Give them two options in a grid format:

(1) do nothing;

(2) redirect mobile to desktop

To the right of that, use two columns to convey pros and cons.

I guess you could do nothing and measure the impact for a few months, comparing this year to last. If things don't look good, then execute option 2. Might be hard to isolate the impact of the mobile index versus anything else though, but it's probably the best you can do.

And then there's the 3rd option... go responsive, but as you've said, you don't have time or budget for that unfortunately.

What you have to weigh is the user impact. How much traffic are you currently getting from mobile devices? Will the desktop version of the website look awful, be hard to interact with or understand on a mobile phone or tablet device? You'll also lose the "mobile friendly" designation which might lower your rankings and click-thru rates.

It's a trade-off decision only you can make.

PS - I don't see "Staff" under your cool avatar.

Michael,

I read a helpful article that touched on this exact topic yesterday. It's https://www.searchenginejournal.com/mobile-first-index-actually-mean/178017/ . As you've already pointed out, a responsive solution is best, but if the website's mobile and desktop content are the same, you may not have to do anything right away.

Check it out.

I discovered a new issue today.

If you're migrating from a site that uses special characters in their URLs (like bigfolio), you can't create individual page-to-page redirects. Squarespace doesn't allow special characters in their redirect syntax and there's no way to create a custom .htaccess file to work around that limitation.

John,

Not long ago, you should have fully expected to lose up to 15% of a page's SEO equity with a 301 redirect. That changed in February of this year when Google's John Mueller announced that no page rank is lost with 301 or 302 redirects.

Moz's own Cyrus Shepard wrote a What You Need To Know Post after that announcement. I think if you read it, you'll be well equipped to weigh your options and decide on the best path forward for this particular situation.

I see everyone's responses and understand that DA is based on a variety of factors, but I also agree that a domain authority of 26 seems unusually high for this site.

Majestic reports a Trust Flow of 0 and Citation Flow of 31 and 35 incoming links from 8 different sources, both of which would lend me to expect a lower domain authority for this site. That said, a couple of the recently discovered incoming links are coming from powerful sources, most notably:

• https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/what-us-publishers-owe-china/2015/05/26/0b100ff8-02fd-11e5-bc72-f3e16bf50bb6_story.html?utm_term=.1ad4d52de865; and
• http://blog.livedoor.jp/takemiya31/archives/51761738.html

It's possible Moz found these links and just isn't displaying them in Open Site Explorer.

It's not unusual to see dramatic fluctuations in DA when a site has few incoming links. If it was me, I'd wait to see what the next API update reports before concluding real progress has been made. Did you bump up the volume of content on the site recently?

Bright Local just released a new (free) tool you can use to specify a location and search term and see Google or Google Local results.  You can specify city, state or ZIP. Seems to work pretty well.

https://www.brightlocal.com/local-search-results-checker/