Redirecting old mobile site

[RickyShockley]

Hi All,

Trying to figure out the best option here. I have a website that used to utilize a separate mobile site (m.xyz.com) but now utilizes responsive design.

What is the best way to deal with that old mobile site? De-index? 301 redirect back to the main site in the rare case someone finds the m. site somewhere?

THanks!

Ricky

[PatrickDelehanty]

Hi there

I would redirect the old mobile URLs to their main URL counterparts. The site is now responsive, so redirecting to the main site relevant pages will format to the screen of the device the user is using. I would also make sure you update your sitemap.

Hope this helps! Good luck!

[CleverPhD]

Agreed.  Used 301s to redirect the old m. pages to their www. counterparts.  This way, not only do users get redirected automatically to the proper page with the correct content, but if there is any link equity, it gets passed along as well.

Key point, do not redirect all of your m. pages to the www home page, that would be bad.  Also, bonus free advice.  If you are setting up global 301 redirects, go ahead and do some additional 301 cleanup in several areas.

1. If your site is indexed in Google with the www subdomain included (i.e. http://www.website.com), make sure that the non www urls for all pages (i.e. http://website.com) 301 redirect to the www version. This needs to be a page to page redirect, not everything to the home page.  Reverse this if your website by default uses the non www subdomain.

2. Likewise if you ever used https or moved from http to https, 301 page to page everything.

3. If you have anything where you have

http://www.website.com is the same as http://www.website.com/index.html or http://www.website.com/folder/index.html  etc 301 all those "index.htm" type urls to the folder ending in the slash.

The idea here is to remove duplicates and have the 301s to do that.

When you get all this done, run a spider (I like Screaming Frog or Botify) to see if you have any navigation, sitemap or other internal links on your site that are 301ing.  Try and think about anywhere else that you control that you might accidentally be pointing to old URLs (rss feed possibly? Your homepage in your Facebook account? etc) You may be pointing (accidentally or on purpose) to old URLs and want to update those.  That is another signal to Google that you are not using the old URLs and pay attention to the 301.  I have found issues with Google still reporting a 301 in Search Console and it was because I was still pointing to it in my navigation.

Cheers!