Should I use the canonical tag on all my mobile pages?
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I've seen flavors of this question asked but did not see the exact response I was looking for.
If I have a site at: www.site.com
And I am creating a mobile version at: m.site.com (let's say a responsive design is not feasible at this time)
And all the content on m.site.com is duplicative of the content on www.site.com
What's the best way to handle that from an SEO perspective? Should I put a canonical tag on every mobile page pointing back to the www page? I assume that is better than a 'no index' tag on all pages of the mobile site?
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Yes, use canonical on the mobile page and point it back to the primary www. version. Rand actually mentioned this in his post the other day:
Answers to 43 Questions About Search, Social, Content, Conversions and More:
Question from Ken Savage: _"@kensavage _@randfish love to know more about canonical issues with site redesigns. When to use them or do I 301 bunch of weird urls?"
Rand's Answer: If possible, most SEOs generally like to use 301 rewrite rules. They scale nicely - even if you have 500,000 pages of product URLs that all need to change, a single 301 rule through .htaccess can often address the problem - and they're still a best practice. I'd lean more towards canonical when you have a specific reason to want to keep the page accessible to users in multiple formats, e.g. print/mobile-friendly versions of articles or the same product with different image views.
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Yes this would bve the best, any links you may get will then give credit to the www page and stop any duplicate content problems
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