Should m-dot sites be indexed at all

[newbiebird]

I have a client with a site with a m-dot mobile version. They will move it to a responsive site sometime next year but in meanwhile I have a massive doubt.

This m-dot site has some 30k indexed pages in Google. Each of this page is bidirectionally linked to the www. version (rel="alternate on the www, rel canonical on the m-dot)

There is no noindex on the m-dot site, so I understand that Google might decide to index the m-dot pages regardless of the canonical to the www site.

But my doubts stays: is it a bad thing that both the version are indexed? Is this having a negative impact on the crawling budget? Or risking some other bad consequence? and how is the mobile-first going to impact on this?

Thanks

[mikeyqu]

Good question!

The m-dot pages might not actually be indexed at all. Check out this article, and specifically the section I'm quoting:

https://searchengineland.com/google-advice-switch-m-dot-domain-responsive-mobile-first-index-rollout-277446

"The rationale is that right now, Google has a desktop-first index. So Google doesn’t really index your m-dot; they just annotate the m-dot URLs, but there is no true indexing of your m-dot content..."

You might first want to double-check that Google is actually indexing the mobile site as you suspect, or simply marking up search results with the subdomain. Mobile-first has been a slow rollout, which might not have hit you yet! This might help you check if you have indeed been moved:

https://blog.seoprofiler.com/google-check-log-files-find-site-moved-mobile-first-index/

If they are indexing, then yes -  you'll have to make sure the URLs migrate appropriately to the new responsive site, and keep a close eye on mobile traffic changes in Search Console.

Hope this helps a bit!

Mike