Google Indexing Desktop & Mobile Versions

[simonukss]

We have a relatively new site and I have noticed recently that Google seems to be indexing both the mobile and the desktop version of our site. There are some queries where the mobile version will show up and sometimes both mobile and desktop show up. This can't be good. I would imagine that what is supposed to happen is that the desktop version is the one that should be indexed (always) and browser detection will load the mobile version where appropriate once the user is on the site.

Do you have any advice on what we should do to solve this problem as we are a bit stuck?

[bridget.randolph]

Have you got switchboard tags implemented? That should solve the issue.

[MikeRoberts]

You can easily restrict portions with robots.txt depending on how exactly your site is set up. So for instance, something like:

Desktop site: http://www.domain.com/robots.txt

User-agent: Googlebot
Allow: /

User-agent: Googlebot-Mobile
Disallow: /

Mobile site:http://m.domain.com/robots.txt

User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /

User-agent: Googlebot-Mobile
Allow: /

Or

User-agent: *

Allow: /

User-agent: Googlebot

Disallow: /mobile/

Allow: /

User-agent: bingbot

Disallow: /mobile/

Allow: /

User-agent: Googlebot-Mobile

Disallow: /

Allow: /mobile/

User-agent: bingbot-mobile

Disallow: /

[GlobeRunner]

What we recommend is that you make sure that you're serving up the mobile version to Google's mobile crawler and the desktop version to Google's desktop crawler. You may be doing both, serving mobile pages to both the desktop and mobile crawlers.

I recommend taking a look at that to make sure it's not an issue. You can crawl your own site using something like Screaming Frog SEO spider and change the user agent to mobile vs. desktop to test it.