Switchboard Tags - Multiple desktop pages pointing to one mobile page

[JBlank]

I have recently started to implement switchboard tags to connect our mobile and desktop pages, and to ensure that our mobile pages show up in rankings for mobile users.  Because our desktop site is much deeper in content than our mobile site, there are a number of desktop pages we would like to have point to one mobile page.  However, with the switchboard tags, this poses a problem because it requires multiple rel=canonical tags to be placed on the one mobile page.  I'm assuming this will either confuse the search engines, or they will choose to ignore the rel=canonical tag altogether.

Any ideas on how to approach this situation other than creating an equivalent mobile version of every desktop page or implementing a user agent detection redirect?

[bridget.randolph]

Hi JBlank,

My solution to this is to ask whether you actually should be using the switchboard tags on all your desktop pages?

Switchboard tags (which are basically a special version of rel=canonical for mobile), are meant to indicate to a search engine that the two pages contain (near-)duplicate content, but that it's ok because one is a mobile version of the other. If the content is not substantially the same, you don't need to have a switchboard tag (just like with the normal rel=canonical).

So my recommendation:

• are any of your mobile pages direct or near-direct duplicates of your desktop pages? If so, use the switchboard tags for those desktop pages. You should also implement redirects in both directions based on user agent so that people land on the version most relevant to them. (And include the option to switch to the other version).

• for the other desktop pages, which may relate to certain mobile pages but which are not at risk of being classed as duplicate content, you can simply ignore them, and allow mobile users to land on a non-mobile-friendly page; or you can redirect mobile visitors to the most relevant page on the mobile site (again, with the option to switch to the 'full site').

If you actually have multiple desktop pages which are so similar that they could both have a rel=alternate tag to the same mobile page, that's probably a separate issue.

If you're concerned about ranking for deep desktop content in mobile search, I'm afraid the most sustainable solution is to develop that content into a more mobile-friendly format.

Hope that helps!