Mobile site not getting indexed

[namansr]

My site is www.findyogi.com - a shopping comparison site

The mobile site is hosted at m.findyogi.com

I fixed my sitemap and attribution to mobile site in May last week. My mobile site pages are getting de-indexed since then.

Website - www.findyogi.com/mobiles/motorola/motorola-moto-g-16gb-b95ef8/price - indexed

Mobile - m.findyogi.com/mobiles/motorola/motorola-moto-g-16gb-b95ef8/price - _not indexed. _

Google is crawling my website and mobile site normally.

What am I am doing wrong?

[TomVolpe]

Hi there,

I’ve taken a quick look at your site, and the reason these pages are not getting indexed is because of the rel=canonical link element in your which indicates to google which version of the page you’d like to be indexed. Note this is just a guideline to Google, but since you’re using it properly they are only indexing the none mobile version of your site.

I can see that you’ve got a redirect in place to send mobile traffic to the mobile page, and there is no need to have both versions of a single page being indexed, and therefore competing against each other in SERPs. As these pages are next to identical in content, googlebot is seeing your rel=canonical and attributing all the SEO juice to your original page.

When someone searches for one of your products they see the result for your desktop page as only one result, not 2 results competing against each other. The user then clicks on the link and is directed toward the mobile site if they’re a mobile user, and your full site if they’re a desktop user.

Take a look at this article on the Google Webmasters Blog:

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.uk/2009/02/specify-your-canonical.html

This line is key: ‘With rel="canonical", properties of the two URLs are consolidated in our index and search results display wikia.com's intended version.’

Let me know if there’s something I’ve missed here, but it looks to me as though you are using the rel=canonical tag correctly.

Thanks,

Tom

[namansr]

Thanks Tom.

It does answer the reason. What I fail to understand is, shouldn't Google show the mobile site on mobile search?  Shouldn't canonical be device dependent?

[TomVolpe]

Hi,

Both versions of the URL aren’t appearing in search results but both are accessible from the same URL, depending on which device you attempt to access the site with. But when you search for a page on your site on a mobile phone and hit the link to the page you’re requesting, then you're directed toward the mobile page thanks to your redirect, even though you aren’t hitting a link to the mobile subdomain.

If you wanted to remove the canonical tags from all your pages that would see your mobile pages indexed in SERPs, but you’d be causing yourself a duplicate content issue and forcing both those pages to compete with one another for the same keyword(s).

So when you search for a page on your site in Google after removing the canonical tag, you’d see the full site URL and then the mobile URL, giving the user the choice to click either. When they click to go to the full site they’ll still be redirected to your mobile page.

I can understand your concern that your mobile site isn’t getting indexed and therefore will not be found in Google but you’re misunderstanding the point - these pages are essentially 2 versions of the same page, containing the same content and different styles. Rather than forcing mobile and main site to compete with each other, you can have the best of both worlds with your current (correct) implementation of the canonical tag.

Thanks,

Tom

[namansr]

Thanks Tom. This answers it.