Hi Bridget,

Thanks for your response. Since asking the question I have implemented the advice that you offer.

Should there also be a rel=alternate and rel=canonical on the corresponding homepages?

Yea it's not that easy to just implement a responsive design unfortunately otherwise I would. That is the long term goal but not a realistic option at the moment, so in the meantime I need to solve the problem described.

I have just noticed that the mobile version of my site is sometimes ranking in the desktop serps either instead of as well as the desktop site. It is not something that I have noticed in the past as it doesn't happen with the keywords that I track, which are highly competitive.

It is happening for results that include our brand name, e.g '[brand name][search term]'. The mobile site is served with mobile optimised content from another URL. e.g wwww.domain.com/productpage redirects to m.domain.com/productpage for mobile.

Sometimes I am only seen the mobile URL in the desktop SERPS, other times I am seeing both the desktop and mobile URL for the same product.

My understanding is that the mobile URL should not be ranking at all in desktop SERPS, could we be being penalised for either bad redirects or duplicate content?

Any ideas as to how I could further diagnose and solve the problem if you do believe that it could be harming rankings?

Thanks Doug,

I will perhaps try having the links removed from the product page and see if that helps.

It's possible that we could add the content to the product pages. Perhaps it could be added to the product page first and then posted to the blog with the website being specified as the canonical link.

Thanks for the suggestions about analysing the different traffic once it lands on the product pages,  I hadn't thought of that.

The setup is that content is added to the blog and linked back to the relevant product page. The blog content is tagged with the name of the product and then any content with the specified tag appears on the product page via an rss feed for that tag.

You're right about different stages of the buying cycle and this is why the supporting content is posted. We have tested some CTA banners with reasonable success but need to find a successful way to implement this feature in wordpress without adding an image file each time.

Nope content is written afresh and not copied at all from manufacturers.

There is the option for customers to leave reviews, although currently no scheme.org markup to add it to the metadata.

What makes you think that a 301 to the product pages will stop them from being indexed. I have 301'd other pages in the past without it casing problems?

I'm not sure what's causing the blog posts to outrank - in most cases it is the other way around. I think Google just prefers certain type of content in some instances - e.g if there are not many reviews available for a product but my client has reviewed the product and posted it to their blog, Google will prefer that to the product page itself.

My client has a blog that posts information about products to support its ecommerce store.

The blog's main purpose is to support the products listed on the main website, but it has become so strong that its posts sometimes rank in the SERPS in place of the website product page, which is undesirable.

The blog posts always link to the product that they are supporting. Are there any other methods, other than doing a 301, that could help the product page to rank instead of the blog post?

Thanks for all your help guys, much appreciated.

I have an established website that ranks well in Google. However, I have just noticed that no xml sitemap has been registered in Google webmaster tools, so the likelihood is that it hasn't been registered with the other search engines. However, there is an html sitemap listed on the website.

Seeing as the website is already ranking well, do I still need to generate and submit an XML sitemap? Could there be any detriment to current rankings in doing so?