Should m-dot sites be indexed at all
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I have a client with a site with a m-dot mobile version. They will move it to a responsive site sometime next year but in meanwhile I have a massive doubt.
This m-dot site has some 30k indexed pages in Google. Each of this page is bidirectionally linked to the www. version (rel="alternate on the www, rel canonical on the m-dot)
There is no noindex on the m-dot site, so I understand that Google might decide to index the m-dot pages regardless of the canonical to the www site.
But my doubts stays: is it a bad thing that both the version are indexed? Is this having a negative impact on the crawling budget? Or risking some other bad consequence? and how is the mobile-first going to impact on this?
Thanks
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Good question!
The m-dot pages might not actually be indexed at all. Check out this article, and specifically the section I'm quoting:
"The rationale is that right now, Google has a desktop-first index. So Google doesn’t really index your m-dot; they just annotate the m-dot URLs, but there is no true indexing of your m-dot content..."
You might first want to double-check that Google is actually indexing the mobile site as you suspect, or simply marking up search results with the subdomain. Mobile-first has been a slow rollout, which might not have hit you yet! This might help you check if you have indeed been moved:
https://blog.seoprofiler.com/google-check-log-files-find-site-moved-mobile-first-index/
If they are indexing, then yes - you'll have to make sure the URLs migrate appropriately to the new responsive site, and keep a close eye on mobile traffic changes in Search Console.
Hope this helps a bit!
Mike
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