Transitioning to responsive design--should we re-direct m.?

[nicole.healthline]

We are moving to responsive design--should we 301 re-direct all of the old m.domain URLs to the corresponding domain.com

[williampatton]

Redirecting the old mobile version of your site to the new responsive design with 301 redirects would pass on any page authority to the corresponding page on domain.com and a responsive design is generally superior in terms of UX.

In my opinion it would be good practice to forward from an exiting mobile version to a new responsive version as per the serve one page to all devices guideline. Using a 301 redirect would be the correct way to do this.

[MikeTek]

I would 2nd William's response here. If there are any links/bookmarks pointing to your mobile pages, you'll want those 301s in the long term. And short term, any pages Googlebot mobile has indexed that are getting mobile search referrals will pass those users along accordingly (and signal to Google to update their index).

In short, yes - 301s would be the way to go.

One caveat: if it's a big undertaking to do this (if you can't match all subdomain requests with a .htaccess redirect pattern and you have a ton of pages, for example) I'd first take a look at the mobile search traffic, referral traffic and inbound links to your m. subdomain. This way you can determine how much you'll be losing out on if you don't set up the 301s. If your mobile site is new enough, not getting a tremendous amount of traffic and has no direct referral sources or inbound links, you may be able to get away without 301ing. I'd probably still push for them though.

[williampatton]

Very well elaborated, maybe I should have done so myself in my original response.

Always try 301 to relevant pages in this situation but if the redirect rules prove a headache (and the site has little to no inbound links) to create then I would simply remove the subdomain and 301 to main domain homepage. Somewhat of a Time vs Overall Benefit issue, or in some cases a Cost vs Benefit issue.

If the m.domain variant has links pointing to it then it's always beneficial to 301 the links the refering sites are pointing to - I'd try to do this as an absolute minimum in this situation.

It is common for mobile versions of sites have no links pointing to them apart from redirects from the main site so in that situation a 301would likely have zero affect whatsoever.