Mobile Canonical Tag Issue

[ggpaul562]

Hey so,

For our site 
we have the desktop version: www.site.com/product-name/product-code/

The mobile version www.site.com/mobile/product-name/product-code

So...on the desktop version we'd have the following..

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Now my question is, what do we do as far as canonicals on the actual mobile URL?

Would it be this?

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OR are we NOT supposed to have mobile canonical tags whatsoever since we've already added "rel alternate" ?

Would like some clarificaiton.

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[ThompsonPaul]

You need to include the canonical tag you described on the mobile URLs, Paul.

That's what "closes the loop" for the search engines to understand how those pages are related to each other, regardless of which one they land on first.

(another) Paul

[ggpaul562]

Perfect, so then I need to remove the parameter that's included in the mobile canonical tag.

Thanks!

[MattRoney]

Hi Paul! If ThompsonPaul answered your question, would you mind marking his reply as a "Good Answer?" It helps us keep track of things, and it'll give him some bonus MozPoints.

[ThompsonPaul]

Not the parameter, specifically speaking, You need to have the canonical on the mobile URL exactly match the primary URL of the non-mobile page. So removing the /mobile/ directory from the URL.

(Technically, a parameter is something added at the end of a URL with a "?" so /product/product-code?sort=desc for example, which you didn't show on your examples. Canonical URLS should never include such parameters. In fact one of the main reasons for using canonicals is to fix issues with extra unwanted parameters being indexed as separate page. Didn't want to risk confusion here.)

Paul