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Redirection strategy for mobile site

Intermediate & Advanced SEO

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RobertHill last edited by
Hello folks!

I am just about to launch a mobile specific version of our website.

We were not able to make the main site responsive so have decided to make a seperate copy on an m dot subdomain.

I have kept the url structure identical between both sites and added a canonical url on the mobile pages pointing to the desktop site.

I will detect and redirect all mobile devices and googlebot mobile crawler to the m dot site.

The questions i have are as follows...
1. Is that the best approach if you use a mobile specific site on a seperate subdomain?
2. What type of redirects should i use to send mobile users (and googlebot mobile) to the mobile site?
3. My mobile site does not have all the pages the desktop site has. What happens if i redirect a mobile user from a page on the desktop site to a page on the mobile site that does not exist? (will give 404 currently). I guess i could maintain a list of valid mobile urls but this would be a pain (and a bit of an overhead)
Your help is most appreciated

Regards
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