Mobile Site - Same Content, Same subdomain, Different URL - Duplicate Content?

[grayloon]

I'm trying to determine the best way to handle my mobile commerce site.

I have a desktop version and a mobile version using a 3rd party product called CS-Cart.

Let's say I have a product page.  The URLs are...

mobile:
store.domain.com/index.php?dispatch=categories.catalog#products.view&product_id=857

desktop:
store.domain.com/two-toned-tee.html

I've been trying to get information regarding how to handle mobile sites with different URLs in regards to duplicate content.  However, most of these results have the assumption that the different URL means m.domain.com rather than the same subdomain with a different address.

I am leaning towards using a canonical URL, if possible, on the mobile store pages.  I see quite a few suggesting to not do this, but again, I believe it's because they assume we are just talking about m.domain.com vs www.domain.com.

Any additional thoughts on this would be great!

[Carson-Ward]

That's an awfully interesting mobile URL =/ Ideally you should only have one URL. If that's not possible, you want to follow the same URL structure as closely as possible. If that's not possible, you'll want to add rel="alternate" on the desktop site to the corresponding mobile URL, and a canonical tag on the mobile site to the desktop site.

https://developers.google.com/webmasters/smartphone-sites/details

By the way, I'd strongly suggest detecting based on screen size or width rather than user-agent wherever possible.

[jjwoods3]

If CS-Cart doesn't work out for you, Shopgate will build you a search optimized mobile site with your current website's look and feel.

[loopyal]

Have you tried doing internal URL mapping, rather than allowing two different URLs?

Do you have access to .htaccess?

First detect the mobile device and then do the internal map for that.

If you can do it, there is still only the friendly URL showing externally.

Of course, it depends how the internal system works and how pages are output, but you would just stop the search engines from accessing the internally mapped links.

[grayloon]

Thank you for the response.

We do have user agent detection going, and users are redirected appropriately.  It's just that I have to redirect them to a non-SEO friendly URL for the mobile store.  There's nothing I can do about that.  I'm thinking I just need a canonical URL tag on the mobile store pages so that Google credits the right link and not the ugly link.

I would love to be able to try something like using the same page with CSS friendly design for mobile devices, but I don't have that option in any way using this 3rd party solution.

[AlanMosley]

You need to server up the right page to the right crawler, googlebot and googlebotmobile

You need to detect the useragent and redirecte to the correct version, this is goolges idea, i think it is a lot of work and bound to cause confusion. You can also set up a mobil sitemap, to help indicate the difference

How i have done my mobile pages is using the same page with the tag and css, this idea is much easier I believe

see this page near the botton,

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/hh553501

here is anouther example

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/query/hh653584