Hi Samuel,

I understand why it makes sense from a user experience perspective, although I'd be a little concerned that it would be a bit weird, especially if the domains are branded differently.

I'd probably start by avoiding an automatic redirect. The simplest option is probably to include a prominent CTA on the desktop version that says 'view mobile version at www.otherdomain.com'. If you want to get a bit fancier, you could display a message when a mobile user agent is detected, saying something like 'it looks like you're on a mobile device. Would you like to view a mobile-friendly version of this page?'.  If you do this, make sure that

• a) the page is still accessible to a crawler with a mobile user agent (in other words, don't require input from the mobile user in order to view the desktop version, just include it as an option)
• b) use a cookie to avoid asking your mobile users to answer the question again every time they visit.

If you really want to do the redirect, start by testing on just a couple pages to check for any negative impact before rolling it out further.

Hi,

Saijo and Bradley are right in saying that hiding elements on a smaller screen should not be an issue (as it's a correct implementation of responsive design). Bear in mind as well that there is a Googlebot and a Smartphone Googlebot, so as long as the Googlebot is seeing what desktop users see and the Smartphone Googlebot (which uses an iPhone5 user agent) is seeing what mobile users see, it shouldn't be a problem.

The only thing I would add:

If you are going to use display:none to prevent a user from seeing something when they view your site, it's good to include an option to 'view full site' or 'view desktop site'. Also in that case I would question whether you actually need that content on the desktop site at all? Because best practice is to provide all the same content regardless of device.

If it's hidden but still accessible to the mobile user (in a collapsible div for instance) there's no cloaking involved so it shouldn't cause a problem.

As a side note: the Vary HTTP header is really for a dynamically served website (that is, a single URL which checks user agent and then serves the desktop HTML to desktop devices and mobile HTML to mobile devices).

Hope that helps!

Hi Pugh,

Glad to hear it! Yes, you should also implement the tag on your homepages.

Hi Pugh,

It sounds like you haven't implemented the rel=canonical tag for mobile. This tag works a bit like the hreflang tag, namely it prevents your mobile site from being viewed as duplicate content and should mean that your mobile URL is displayed in mobile SERPs and your desktop URL is displayed in desktop SERPs.

To implement (for more info see https://developers.google.com/webmasters/smartphone-sites/details

on the desktop page, add:

and on the **corresponding **mobile page, the required annotation should be:

This rel="canonical" tag on the mobile URL pointing to the desktop page is required.

Make sure you are referencing the corresponding URLs (so www.example.com/xyz and m.example.com/xyz, rather than simply referencing the mobile homepage).

Hope that helps!