Mobile URLs stolen and I need them back!

[Voonie]

Hi guys,

Mobile SEO question.

So some time in the past, my client accidentally got a whole bunch of m.example.co.nz URLs indexed due to a link on another website and the awesome relative URL links on my client website.

However, now they're building a mobile website and they want all those m.example.co.nz URLs.

My question is, if we build a new mobile website and use those mobile website URLs including those already indexed by Google, will Google automatically know after crawling those URLs that they are now for mobile users? Will it change the pages to it's mobile index? Or will it be a case of duplicate content?

Thanks

Kim

[MalcolmGibb]

If the site content is exactly the same Google will see them as duplicate content. If the site content is different Google will see them as separate sites, however you will now have two sites competing for ranking with one another. Google usually sees the m.domain as for mobile but not always. I tend to use a user agent redirect which detects if users are on mobile based browsers and redirects them to the m.domain. So you can keep your normal listing in Google, yet when users click on it on a mobile device they will be redirected to the mobile page.