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Your experience far exceeds mine, so I don't have much confidence in my response here but I'm a bit puzzled: If I tell the desktop bot to follow to the mobile site, then it will crawl the mobile friendly pages, which I don't want it to do because its the wrong bot to be crawling the mobile pages with.  I assume the mobile bot will find my site the same way the desktop bot will find it, and isn't dependent on the desktop bot to find it.  It's the same url for both: www.qjamba.com  so as long as the mobile bot goes to that url it will crawl it.

From what I just read the alternate tag is used when the page is actually a different url name, and that isn't the case for my site

HERE'S MY CONCERN: The mobile bot has crawled my mobile friendly home page, and it lists it as 'mobile-friendly' on a mobile device, but it is still using the wrong title, which makes me suspect something very worrisome: Google doesn't keep(for anybody) separate indexes for mobile and desktop bots when the url is the same:  It may crawl both and check for mobile rendering for the mobile, and it may use the crawl to determine what other pages to crawl for the respective bot, but the content itself perhaps isn't being stored seperately for the mobile bot (ask yourself -- would it store separate content for mobile when a responsive site design is used?  i'm thinking maybe it wouldn't).

Unfortunately, very few people in SEO seem to know the answer to this critical issue, and it seems very hard to test because of the lag time Google has in putting things into the index (ie it may crawl with the other bot before it puts the content into the index for the first bot--see next para).

IF THAT FEAR IS REALITY, I need to probably move to using a separate domain for my site because my mobile version excludes a whole bunch of content that exists for desktop only--yet if I tell the mobile bot that those URLS are 404 it perhaps would remove the url from the only index it has - the desktop index - and if I tell it they are 301s, then it may replace the desktop index content with the redirection content (the mobile home page), which would totally counterproductive.

Thanks again...I'm really not sure what to do anymore though..

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Thanks for your reply, but the link you pointed me to isn't my situation.  I'm not redirecting to separate urls.   Mine is this: https://developers.google.com/webmasters/mobile-sites/mobile-seo/configurations/dynamic-serving

I HAVE to figure out what Google is doing in my situation because if I don't and I assume wrong, then lots of pages for either my desktop or mobile friendly  won't be indexed.

Surely lots of website owners have had their developers create a minimal mobile friendly site with less content and pages than desktop users get and chosen the dynamic-serving approach, but I have yet to receive a reply from anyone who has faced that issue..It's a very serious issue for me because either I have to consider dumping the dynamic serving in favor of separate mobile urls (if that would work), or I have to do a ton of programming to add in content so that all the urls have both mobile and desktop content.

interesting..thanks!

Google's removal tool doesn't give a person the option to tell them which index - mobile friendly, or desktop/laptop - the url should be removed from. Why?

I may have a fundamental misunderstanding.  The way I thought it works is that when you have a dynamically generated page based on the user agent, (ie, the SAME URL but different formatting for smartphones as for desktop/laptop)  then the Google mobile bot will index the mobile friendly version and the desktop bot will index the desktop version -- so Google will have 2 different indexed results for the same url.  That SEEMS to be validated by the existence of the words 'mobile-friendly' next to some of my mobile friendly page descriptions on mobile devices.

HOWEVER, if that's how it works--why would Google not allow a person to remove one of the urls and keep the other?  Is it because Google thinks a mobile version of a website must have all of the identical pages as the desktop version?  What if it doesnt?  What if a website is designed so that some of the slower pages simply aren't given a mobile version?  Is it possible that Google doesn't really save results for a mobile friendly page if there is a corresponding desktop page-- but only checks to see if it renders ok?  That is, it keeps only one indexed copy of each url, and basically assumes the mobile title and actual content is the same and only the formatting is different?  That assumption isn't always true -- mobile devices lend themselves to different interactions with the user - but it certainly could save Google billions of dollars in storage.

Thoughts?

Thanks Kristina, but I need some clarification:

I thought Google would be indexing www.qjamba.com  and www.qjamba.com/?siteview=mobile as two different links.  Am I wrong about that?

Also, I thought "nofollow" is different than 'noindex', and just tells the desktop bot not to go to the mobile page, because once it does that they program treats it like a mobile device/mobile bot and renders mobile pages.

thanks, Ted

Hi AMHC,

It makes sense that without hardly any backlinks built up Google wont find my upper case URLS since all the page links have been changed, however, I am writing out all of the urls that are redirected into email, and from that I can tell that Google is finding them--I guess they may have a list of urls from prior indexing that they crawl independent of what their crawler comes up with.

I'll keep looking to see what they have indexed and if it turns out they just aren't crawling certain pages, will put them in a sitemap to be crawled..It's a good idea for taking care of the problem quickly--so if it progresses too slowly I'll do that.

Thanks very much for your answers!

Thanks Oleg, My site is pretty new, so I don't think one is better than another from an 'authority' standpoint.  So, should it just go to www.domain.com (which appears to be the equivalent of http://www.domain.com)?

People can come to a site www.domain.com  in these 6 different ways.

http://www.domain.com, www.domain.com, http://domain.com, domain.com

https://www.domain.com, https://domain.com

Obviously we don't want google to maintain an index for any more than one of these.

What is the way to handle this? 301 redirects for all to resolve to www.domain.com? Or is that overkill? Or 302 redirects?   Seems like a pretty basic issue but I'm not finding simple answers.

When I put in site:www.qjamba.com  on a mobile device it comes back with some of my mobile-friendly pages for that site(same url for mobile and desktop-just different formatting), and that's great.  HOWEVER, it also shows a whole bunch of the pages (not identified by Google as mobile-friendly) that are fine for desktop users but are not supposed to exist for the mobile users, because they are too slow.  Until a few days ago those pages were being redirected for mobile users to the home page.  I since have changed that to 404 not founds.

Do we know that Google keeps a mobile index separate from the desktop index?  If so, I would think that 404 should work..

How can I test whether the 404 not founds will remove a url so they DON'T appear on a mobile device when I put in site:www.qjamba.com (or a user searches) but DO appear on a desktop for the same command.

OMG! Yes, I see now, I was doing this:

header("Location: $goto ");

and I need to do something like this:

header("HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently"); header("Location: $goto");

What a dunce...Thanks so much!

Thanks AMHC.  In my case, I just don't have many back links so I don't have the urgency that you faced with getting Google to see all the redirects.  But, I'm still not understanding--it sounds like you believe that once google sees the redirect it removes the old uppercase from its index.  It doesn't look to me like that is what happened in my case because Google is currently indexing BOTH, and so that means it has crawled my new lowercase and I know it isn't crawling any uppercase anymore (it cant--all are redirected).  So, that's why I wonder if I have to remove those uppercase urls...does that make sense or am I just not understanding it still?

EDIT: I just discovered I wasn't doing a 301 direct so it wasn't considered a permanent move.  That, if I understand it right, will remove the upper case from googles index permanently.

I gotcha.  Yeah, different thing going on here..these urls can be really difficult!  I have uppercase lowercase, https http, urls that have different content(not just formatting) for mobile as desktop and vice versa, mobile urls that dont even exist for desktop, and desktop urls that dont exist for mobile..all under the same domain.  1000s of internal pages....In the desire to create a good website for users I've created an SEO monster  because I didn't realize the many consequences with regard to search indexes.

If you know a true expert in these areas I need him/her.  4 years on this site, its live finally (2 months), and now I'm discovering all of these things have to be fixed, but i can't afford thousands of dollars..I'll do the work, I just need the knowledge!

Hutch, thanks.

The site is dynamic with thousands of pages that are now being redirected to lower case, so I'm not seeing how using canonical would work because the upper case urls aren't on the site anymore. I guess I think of canonical as being useful when you have ongoing content on the site that duplicates one or more other pages on the same site.  In my case none of the upper case urls exist anymore so they don't have 'ongoing' content.  I'm still new to this so if it sounds like I have it wrong, please correct me.

Linda, thanks.

Looks lIke I need to figure out a redirect fix on this.

You addressed the question of once I successfully get the redirecting to work, do I need to tell Google to remove the https version?  It sounds like you are saying they will be dropped automatically.  Are you sure?  I ask because if you look at this: site:www.qjamba.com/online-savings/automotix  Google seems to have both upper case and lower case indexed, even though they have indexed the lower case because I recently added a redirect from uppercase to lowercase.  It appears they aren't automatically removing the upper from their indexing so I'm wondering if I need to use a removal tool..

AMHC, thank you for your response.  I'm in the middle of quite a mess, as this is one of several issues, so really appreciate your help.  I must confess to not following everything you wrote exactly:

In your situation, I think i understand the redirect -- it is the same reason I am doing a redirect--it is so that anyone coming from to this site with uppercase in it will end up on the lower case page, and in the case of google will then index the page as a lower case page.  BTW, for me that has been easy as I am doing it via php -- if the url doesn't equal its strtolower of the url , then I redirect to strtolower.

I think I get what you are saying about the sitemap -- it speeds up google crawling the site and seeing that all those upper cases should be lowercase from your redirect.  In my case, i don't have the concern about Google discovering them as you did because my site is only a couple months old.  And, I never have given Google a sitemap so many of my pages aren't crawled yet (I am trying to clean up my entire url structure before i submit a sitemap to them--however they have already crawled perhaps 20% of the site, so I'm now trying to examine what google has crawled and how it has been indexed to figure out what needs to be done).

What I'm not understanding is this:  It seems to me that what you described should succeed for going forward to getting both Google and your users to the right ending page, but I don't see how it removes the prior uppercase urls from Google's index.  What is it that tells Google your prior upper case urls should no longer be in their index?  Is it the fact that they aren't in the sitemap you provide now?  Or, do they literally have to be removed using some kind of removal or disavow tool?  I discovered this (as you see in the op) because Google appears to never have removed the Uppercase ones even though they are indexing the lower case now.

Ted

My site used to be entirely HTTPS.  I switched months ago so that all links in the pages that the public has access to are now http only.  But I see now that when I do a site:www.qjamba.com,

the results include many pages with https in the beginning (including the home page!), which is not what I want.  I can redirect to http but that doesn't remove https from the indexing, right?

How do I solve this problem?

sample of results:

• Qjamba: Free Local and Online Coupons, coupon codes ...

  **<cite class="_Rm">https://www.qjamba.com/</cite>**One and Done savings. Printable coupons and coupon codes for thousands of local and online merchants. No signups, just click and save.

• Chicnova online coupons and shopping - Qjamba

  **<cite class="_Rm">https://www.qjamba.com/online-savings/Chicnova</cite>**Online Coupons and Shopping Savings for Chicnova. Coupon codes for online discounts on Apparel & Accessories products.

• Singlehop online coupons and shopping - Qjamba

  <cite class="_Rm">https://www.qjamba.com/online-savings/singlehop</cite>Online Coupons and Shopping Savings for Singlehop. Coupon codes for online discounts on Business & Industrial, Service products.

• Automotix online coupons and shopping - Qjamba

  <cite class="_Rm">https://www.qjamba.com/online-savings/automotix</cite>Online Coupons and Shopping Savings for Automotix. Coupon codes for online discounts on Vehicles & Parts products.

• Online Hockey Savings: Free Local Fast | Qjamba

  **<cite class="_Rm">www.qjamba.com/online-shopping/hockey</cite>**Find big online savings at popular and specialty stores on Hockey, and more.

• Hitcase online coupons and shopping - Qjamba

  **<cite class="_Rm">www.qjamba.com/online-savings/hitcase</cite>**Online Coupons and Shopping Savings for Hitcase. Coupon codes for online discounts on Electronics, Cameras & Optics products.

• Avanquest online coupons and shopping - Qjamba

  <cite class="_Rm">https://www.qjamba.com/online-savings/avanquest</cite>Online Coupons and Shopping Savings for Avanquest. Coupon codes for online discounts on Software products.

This search   -  site:www.qjamba.com/online-savings/automotix

gives me this result from Google:

Automotix online coupons and shopping - Qjamba
https://www.qjamba.com/online-savings/automotix
Online Coupons and Shopping Savings for Automotix. Coupon codes for online discounts on Vehicles & Parts products.

and Google tells me there is another one, which is 'very simliar'.  When I click to see it I get:

Automotix online coupons and shopping - Qjamba
https://www.qjamba.com/online-savings/Automotix
Online Coupons and Shopping Savings for Automotix. Coupon codes for online discounts on Vehicles & Parts products.

This is because I recently changed my program to redirect all urls with uppercase in them to lower case, as it appears that all lowercase is strongly recommended.

I assume that having 2 indexed urls for the same content dilutes link juice.  Can I safely remove all of my UpperCase indexed pages from Google without it affecting the indexing of the lower case urls?  And if, so what is the best way -- there are thousands.

Thanks Cyrus.  Very good points!

Thanks Sheena.  In the second scenario good point--they are generated via user POST so in theory Google should never see them or index them, but since they can be shared Google ends up finding them, so I do need to make sure Google doesn't index them if possible.