Canonical and Alternate REL

[yousayjump]

Hi

I have a website which is mostly dynamic content from a database. In the header of the site I have a function which outputs the rel="canonical" link and in some cases the canonical is the page the user is visiting and not another page on the site but I still show it in the source.

However we have just recently launched our mobile website which is stored on an M DOT domain (i.e. m.mydomain.com) which has different URL's to my main website so following Google's recommendations we have created rel="alternate" links on my desktop site to point to the equivalent mobile pages and on the mobile pages I have created rel="canonical" links which point back to the relevant desktop site keeping everything tidy.
My question is, is there an issue with having both a rel="canonical" and rel="alternate" in the source of of a single page on my desktop site?  Is it conflicting or detrimental in anyway?

Thanks for reading

[Dr-Pete]

Technically, it should be ok, but this is a scenario that behave unpredictably, and it's why many mobile SEO folks seems to be recommending more and more moving away from alternate domains. You're doing it the way Google recommends for your situation, as far as I'm aware, but I would monitor the situation very, very carefully, and make sure that there's not crossover or duplicate content issues.

It's a bit technically challenging, but you may also want to make sure that Googlebot-Mobile is hitting the proper site. See this advice:

https://developers.google.com/webmasters/smartphone-sites/redirects