How can I resolve weird duplicates showing up because of my mobile website?

[Ideas-Money-Art]

We launched a mobile site a month ago following the parallel mobile structure with a URL: m.example.com

The week later my moz crawl detected thousands of dups which I am trying to resolve right now by implementing canonical tags on the mobile version and rel=alternate onto the desktop version.

So what is weird is that I found urls that were detected as duplicates on top of the regular duplicate:

www.example.com/name?device=desktop

m.example.com/name?device=mobile

These 2 urls double the number of duplicates. Can you tell me what are these? is this normal? and how can I fix those?

Thank you mozzers!

[NakulGoyal]

Just add canonical tags on your website so that search engines always only crawl one version of the URL. Typically, these duplicate URLs are created by the CMS. It might also be easier to remove these extra URLs, but then you have device=desktop on your desktop site and device =mobile on your mobile site. That makes me think it might be best to add a canonical tag on both sets of pages as well as having a rel=alternate.

I hope this helps.

[Ideas-Money-Art]

Hey Nakul

"It might also be easier to remove these extra URLs, but then you have device=desktop on your desktop site and device =mobile on your mobile site."

Are you saying that if I try to remove these URLs I won't be able to do so? Can you clarify?

Thanks

[NakulGoyal]

There are 2 aspects to removing these pages (I am presuming these URLs are already indexed in Google).

First, you need to get these removed, so that they do not exist. Either a 404 or a Canonical to itself.

If it's a canonical, as Google recrawls these pages, they will drop the duplicates from their Index. If they are 404, then also they will drop or you can request remove via Google Webmaster Console.

I can's say specifically without looking at the actual example.

I hope this helps.

[Ideas-Money-Art]

Thank you Nakul!