Problem with duplicate pages due to mobile site.
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Hey everyone,
We've got an issue where our current shopping cart provider (Volusion) allows us to use canonical and rel="alternate" links, however the canonical links are forced on our Desktop as well as mobile pages. When they should only be on the mobile pages. You can view what I mean at the below two pages:
http://www.absoluteautomation.ca/fgd400-sensaphone400-p/fgd400.htm
https://www.absoluteautomation.ca/mobile/Product.aspx?ProductCode=FGD400
Does anyone have any ideas in terms of working around this?
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You have the rel="alternate" tags from the page back to the mobile version, right? That seems odd...has anyone else had this with mobile and desktop pages in WMT?
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Awesome thanks Linda, any thoughts than as to why WMT is listing these pages as being considered "duplicates"?
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You could always block DESKTOP content spiders from crawling the mobile portion of your site using your robots.txt file. Then, to make sure your mobile site gets indexed properly, make sure to add a link on your desktop site somewhere so that a mobile content crawler can still go through it. This should take care of your issue.
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I am not sure what you want to work around? Having the canonical tag on the canonical page? That is not a problem. Here is Matt Cutts on the topic: http://youtu.be/U8eQgx-njk4
I think Bing used to have an issue with it, but it is such a common thing to have a situation like yours where canonical tags are automatically put on pages that even that stance has softened, I believe.
[They are also handy to have on pages in case someone steals them outright--they will still give credit to the home site.
]
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