Mobile Options for indexing mobile sites and live sites.

[Highline_Ideas]

Our development team has noindexed our mobile versions of desktop pages in Wordpress. I am wondering if there is a negative impact to noindexing the mobile pages? We have a desktop version of the page live so the content is available in both locations and I believe we would be avoiding duplicate content issues by no indexing the mobile page, is there a reason I am missing that I would not want to noindex my mobile pages?

Thank you in advance for your assistance.

[simon_realbuzz]

It doesn't make sense to noindex your mobile pages, after all, surely you want them indexing especially if some of your pages are not exact duplicates of your desktop site pages. If you are concerned about the appearance of duplicate content, then use a special mobile rel='canonical’ tag. You find plenty about it here where essentially the advice from Google is as follows:

To help our algorithms understand this configuration on your site, we recommend using the following annotations:

1. On the desktop page, add a special link rel="alternate" tag pointing to the corresponding mobile URL. This helps Googlebot discover the location of your site's mobile pages.
2. On the mobile page, add a link rel="canonical" tag pointing to the corresponding desktop URL.

You'll see an example of implementation on the page if you click on the link I've added. Hope this helps.