Noindex Mobile Site?

[Sean_Dawes]

So I wanted to get everyone's opinion. Have a client in online retail on ASP and their developers built a mobile site a while back before we took the client on.

For the sake of this post, just assume, resources are limited anddevelopers are not good (constantly break things we request to get fixed). They never installed analytics on the mobile site, so all I have to go off of is referral data on the main stores GA account for m.example.com

However if I look to see what is indexed by doing site:m.example.com am not seeing many pages.

The mobile site has a ton of internal links in GWT and am questioning its negative impact as there are no canonicals, no mobile sitemap present. In the ideal world, I would implement proper Mobile SEO practices but given the resources of no dev budget and devs not being good, I was thinking about noindexing the mobile site since I can RDP into the site and access robots.

Thoughts?

[Doc_Sheldon]

Sean- You don't say if the content on the mobile site is unique, but assuming it is, I think that I would first just set canonicals to the main site. Assuming the site hasn't just been put up, I find it odd that you're finding only a few pages indexed. Unless there are known issues that concern you, I think I'd probably submit an xml sitemap for the mobile site and wait to see it indexed. From what you've said at this point, I don't see any need to noindex the mobile version.

[Sean_Dawes]

Sheldon,

Appreciate the answer but in my original question I asked if you were unable to do proper mobile practices (canonicals and mobile sitemap).

Content is far from unique. Product level pages are duplicated and category level are blank.

It is a very long story hence why I mentioned, I know what "should" be done here but given resources (developers are idiots and client can't afford dev hours as there are years and years of issues which we are also tackling right now) I was curious what people would do.

Sean

[jmueller]

Hello Sean,

From my experiences I suggest not to index the mobile sites if you have a browser-switch active. That results in serving the mobile site to mobile users anyway.

At least at the moment (2013/06) there is no seperate mobile index that would favour mobile results (that I know of) over "desktop" results.

Google itself suggests using a responsive design to counter any duplicate content issues that naturally arise. Even a canonical tag does not help the indexation as canonical does not prevent indexation.

So my suggestion would be: noindex the whole mobile site IF your desktop site can handle the redirect (which is strongly recommended)

best of luck,
Jan