Thread: Mobile versions of site and how to make sure that doesn't mess up seo?

This is new to me

If we have domain.com as the main regular content site and then have a link in the footer to the mobile site with the url structure domain.com/?wpmp_switcher=mobile

To me that is like canonicalization issues domain.com not 301 to www.domain.com or other wonky cms homepage url variations not all pushing properly to the main standard. but is this somehow different with how these mobile thangs are setup? I see domain.com/?wpmp_switcher=mobile has the exact same content and look as domain.com but i dont know if that sort of stuff has something different in the background code or something that prevents gbot from giving it grief

Thanks for any advice on this

If they are two different domains with the exact same content I could see it possibly being an issue... What plugin uses that extension... I'll sniff around about it.

<a onclick='document.cookie="wpmp_switcher=mobile;pat h=/;expires=Tue, 01-01-2030 00:00:00 GMT";' href="http://www.domain.com/?wpmp_switcher=mobile">Switch to our mobile site</a>

thats the source code for the link

wp plugin being used is WordPress › WordPress Mobile Pack « WordPress Plugins

trying to find contact info now and email the devs to ask about this

though i did find this support thread that further adds to my concerns
WordPress › Support » [Plugin: WordPress Mobile Pack] Google Panda Penalty Because of Mobile Pack Plugin

i have very very limited info on mobile stuff, 'i read somewhere' there are some ways to prevent dup issues but i can't remember details of what was said about that. the way this is setup does not look good to me unless there is some magic going in the background that i am unaware of

Just block the mobile versions query string with Robots.txt. As long as you keep it out of the index it won't cause any problems.

just make it so anything with wpmp_switcher=mobile in it does not get indexed? doh! hadn't thought of that

is there a difference/benefit from doing this in robots vs the htaccess file? or should i do both?

another strange thing is, if i site scrape the root domain, there are no wpmp_switcher=mobile based urls that come up in g's index

if i do a manual g search for site:site:http://www.domain.com/?wpmp_switcher=mobile all i see come up in the results are pages for the main non mobile domain

Robots.txt is the easiest to implement it, especially if it hasn't been indexed yet. A meta tag on the actual page is the best option though.

It will (normally) strip the query strings off the URLs when doing a site search. You can force it using inurl:

Code:

site:www.google.com inurl:wpmp_switcher=mobile

Worth doing though, just took a quick look, looks like that plugin will duplicate your entire site lol.

inurl:wpmp_switcher=mobile - Google Search

weird, nothing is coming up as indexed with that forced inurl search you mentioned. but I do see it for the boingboing example you posted yikes! so yeah, we are going to add this to the robots file before things go apeshit...very new site so guess that is why it hasnt started showing up in the index yet...

...if it is noindexed in the robots file though...wont that block it from gbotmobile? or will mobile devices still bring that up when navigating the main site?

It has multiple pages and will be an ever expanding site so how would the meta tag on each page work if that is the ideal option?

Thanks a bunch