Exclude pages from search results based on device class (mobile/desktop)
- by user32224
We're currently building a new responsive website. While working on the site map, we figured that we don't want to show certain sections on mobile devices. This can be easily done by hiding the navigation parts using CSS/media queries.
However, the trouble is that the hidden sites would still show up in search engine results. If a user happens to click on one of these links she might happen to see a badly formatted page as we'd use desktop/tablet only code to show images and video.
Is there any way influence the search engines to exclude certain pages if the search is done on a mobile device? Do search engines crawl pages once or with a device specific view twice? Could we set a noindex meta tag for a specific device class?