Mobile site is not ranking in the mobile search results

[pugh]

I posted last month about problems with a mobile site, which is served from a separate URL (m.mydomain.com) as currently responsive design is not an option.

The problem was that the mobile site was being returned in the desktop index along with the desktop site, and the desktop site was being returned in the mobile index instead of the mobile site.

I have therefore implemented rel=canonical and rel=alternate as is advised by Google, but this has stopped the desktop site from appearing in the mobile index, but hasn't caused the mobile site to rank instead.

What should I do now? One idea I have is to remove the rel=canonical and rel=alternate links so that the desktop site ranks in the mobile index again. There is a redirect in place anyway so when people click on a desktop link from a mobile search, they will still be redirected to the mobile equivalent.

I could then set the m.mydomain.com to noindex to stop it from being returned in the desktop results and potentially causing duplicate content issues?

What do you think about this as a work around?

[AndersS]

Hi!

Have you considered blocking googlebot from the mobile site, only allowing googlebot-mobile to crawl the site? And vice versa for the desktop site? See https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/1061943?hl=en for a list of googlebots...

Best regards,
Anders

[pugh]

Thanks for the suggestion Anders. I have considered this, although other advice suggests googlebot should not be blocked.

I have now managed to get Google analytics set up for the mobile domain. Before I had been relying on webmaster tools which for some reason is reporting that there is no traffic landing on my m.domain.com, whereas GA shows that it is now getting traffic from mobile and not desktop, as desired. So even though the mobile urls are ranking in the desktop results, users are not landing on them.

[bridget.randolph]

Hi, I'm wondering what implementation you used for the rel=canonical? I'm very surprised to hear that adding the tags negatively impacted the mobile site's ranking in the mobile SERPs; all it should have done is change the URL to the m. version.

I would not recommend the workaround you suggested, as redirecting a ranking and indexed page to a noindexed page (let alone several noindexed pages) will most likely cause confusion for the crawler.