Is there an advantage to using rel=canonical rather than noindex on pages on my mobile site (m.company.com)?

[jennifer.new]

Is there an advantage to using link rel=alternate (as recommended by Google) rather than noindex on pages on my mobile site (m.company.com)?

The content on the mobile pages is very similar to the content on the desktop site. I see Google recommends canonical and alternate tags, but what are the benefits of using those rather than noindex?

[LearnInternetGrow]

Google gives mobile friendly pages preference on mobile users SERPs. When they crawl your site they determine if a page is "mobile friendly" and they index it to serve.

Since the mobile-friendly update on April 21st of this year, Google will favor mobile friendly and responsive pages on mobile device SERPs.

Use this tool to verify that your pages are mobile friendly

Mobile-Friendly Test

If you no index your mobile pages, they will not be crawled and assessed as mobile friendly. Thereby negating the whole point of having a mobile version of your site. Stick to Rel=canonical to tell google which page is authentic/original. Add the rel="canonical" tag to point to the desktop and the rel="alternate" on the desktop site to point to the mobile site.

Check mobile configuration - go to option, Dynamic Serving

Use the bots name "Googlebot-Mobile" to differentiate which version of your site to serve. Serve up the mobile version when that bot name visits for a crawl. Check in the User-agent header.

Specifically referenced -

"Once Googlebot-Mobile crawls your URLs, we then check for whether the URL is viewable on a mobile device. Pages we determine aren't viewable on a mobile phone won't be included in our mobile site index (although they may be included in the regular web index)."

From - Google Webmasters Blog

Also, check out the Webmasters Mobile Documentation.

Once Googlebot-Mobile crawls your URLs, we then check for whether the URL is viewable on a mobile device. Pages we determine aren't viewable on a mobile phone won't be included in our mobile site index (although they may be included in the regular web index).

[jennifer.new]

Isn't a noindex page still crawlable though? We are not disallowing it in robots.txt - they just don't want both the mobile site and the desktop site showing up in the search index.

My developers are telling me that if the desktop site redirects a mobile user to the mobile site, it will get the mobile friendly tag. (It's a separate subsite, rather than dynamic serving on the same URL).

[bridget.randolph]

Hi Jennifer,

You should definitely index the mobile site. As long as you correctly implement the mobile switchboard tags (which are basically a mobile-specific version of the standard rel=canonical/rel=alternate approach) this will not lead to duplication but rather to the correct version of the page showing up for mobile searches.

There is some discussion around whether or not Google currently has a separate index for mobile search (in any case they are likely to in future if they don't currently) but they definitely have a separate mobile crawler, which spoofs an iPhone user-agent. If you noindex all the mobile pages and redirect mobile user-agents to mobile versions of your pages, what the mobile crawler will see is your whole site as noindexed.

[jennifer.new]

If we can't change the tags before launch, but change them immediately after, how long does it take Google to recognize the change and adjust our ranking? Will we be digging ourselves out of a hole if we implement it the wrong way and fix it shortly after?