A few important mobile SEO questions

[YairSpolter]

I have a few basic questions about mobile SEO. I'd appreciate if any of you fabulous Mozzers can enlighten me.

Our site has a parallel mobile site with the same urls, using an m. domain for mobile and www. for desktop. On mobile pages, we have a rel="canonical" tag pointing to the matching desktop URL and on desktop pages we have a rel="alternate" tag pointing to the matching mobile URL. When someone visits a www. page using a mobile device, we 301 them to the mobile version.

Questions:

1. Do I want my mobile pages to be indexed by Google? From Tom's (very helpful) answers here, it seems that I only want Google indexing the full site pages and if the mobile pages are indexed it's actually a duplicate content issue. This is really confusing to me since Google knows that it's not duplicate content based on the canonical tag. But - he makes a good point - what is the value of having the mobile page indexed if the same page on desktop is indexed (I know that Google is indexing both because I see them in search results. When I search on mobile Google serves the mobile page and when I search on desktop Google serves me the desktop page.)? Are these pages competing with each other? Currently, we are doing everything we can do ensure that our mobile pages are crawled (deeply) and indexed, but now I'm not sure what the value of this is? Please share your knowledge.

2. Is a mobile page's ranking affected by social shares of the desktop version of the same page? Currently, when someone uses the share buttons on our mobile site, we share the desktop url (www. - not m.). The reason we do this is that we are afraid that if people are sharing our content with 2 different url's (m.mysite.com/some_post and www.mysite.com/some_post) the share count will not be aggregated for both url's. What I'm wondering is: will this have a negative effect on mobile SEO, since it will seem to Google that our mobile pages have no shares, or is this not a problem, since the desktop pages have a rel="alternate" tag pointing to mobile pages, so Google gives the same ranking to the mobile page as the desktop page (which IS being shared)?

[YairSpolter]

Thanks so much!

This is exactly what I wanted to know.

[gazzerman1]

After a pretty long conversation a while ago with Google's John Mueller, we tok the plunge and developed mobile version of our site.

We then went on to discuss how Google ranks mobile. He mentioned that it works like a swap, it will look at the content on your desktop version and determine from that what page to display in Google mobile. So a page could simply have little to no text but rank in mobile for the text that is on teh desktop version. Its al bit of a flaw in some ways.

However a big thing taken into account is if your site is mobile optimized, if Google was unable to index your pages it would not be able to determine if you had optimized for mobile and would decrease you ranking opportunity.

Duplicate content is not an issue, especially if its marked as alternate/canonical

As the alternate works like a swap it the social is also not an issue, in fact you are better in some ways having all social and all link building going to one place.

For example my co.uk has no links social shares etc.. its all on my .com, when a user searches for my site in google.co.uk, Google looks for what site ranks best and then looks to see if there is an alternative it should swap out in its place.

So if you had some shares on one and some shares on another it would be less powerful than all on one site combined.

Hope that makes sense?