Rel Conical - Mobile page

[cbarron]

I have two pages that have essentially the same content, same page title etc. however one is the mobile version of the other. Is it appropriate to use the rel canonical tag with these two pages?

So the pages are:

www.example.com/product

www.example.com/mobile/product

If  rel canonical is not appropriate what, if anything should I do?

[Andy.Drinkwater]

Hi Conor,

If visitors are correctly redirected to the mobile page already, you don't really need to do anything else. If there is a rule that takes someone to the mobile site (when on a mobile platform), that is pretty much all you need to do. Sticking a canonical tag in there will confuse issues.

-Andy

[GPainter]

Hi Conor,

First off you may find this video from Matt Cutts helpful, he mentioned about blocking the Google mobile bot from your none mobile site. You can also use the rel=alternative and canonical the mobile to the desktop version.  you may find this page super helpful -

https://developers.google.com/webmasters/smartphone-sites/details#separateurls

Annotation in the HTML

On the desktop page, add:

<code><link< span="">rel="alternate"media="only screen and (max-width: 640px)"  href="http://m.example.com/page-1"></link<></code> 

and on the mobile page, the required annotation should be:

<code><link< span="">rel="canonical"href="http://www.example.com/page-1"></link<></code> 

This rel="canonical" tag on the mobile URL pointing to the desktop page is required.

The canonical tag only affect search engines and won't affect users so if you're sharing the same content canonical to the desktop. You may find having a URL structure like  m.example.com/product better for organizing the two sites.

Hope that helps.

good luck!