Should I block indexing of my mobile site?

Question

I notice that Yahoo and Bing have started indexing the mobile version of my website, which is located at /mobile from the root. All of the mobile content is just a reduced layout version of the real site.

Is it going to negatively affect my SEO if the crawlers are seeing two locations that essentially have the same content?

Answer 1

Have you thought about using a mobile sitemap?

• Mobile Sitemaps

Here is an article:

• Help Google index your mobile site

Answer 2

It sounds like your implementation is quite flawed. You should research best practice methods for serving mobile optimized content (using device detection - not cloaking, canonical link element) etc, rather trying to band-aid your current situation.

Try looking at:

• https://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35312
• http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/11/running-desktop-and-mobile-versions-of.html
• http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/02/making-websites-mobile-friendly.html

Answer 3

It could cause duplicate content issues, particularly with Google. If the content is exactly the same I'd block the mobile content from crawlers.

Answer 4

Stick in (mobile) or some other indicator into the title of each page and Google should be able to figure out which site people want.

Google has people that check over the content of search results that should appear so they should be able to distinguish between standard and mobile websites.

Answer 5

i would consider adding a rel canonical tag to the mobile pages which points back to the main site.

Answer 6

Apparently earlier this month at SMX Advanced Google officially said(paraphrased by author):

don’t block Googlebot from your mobile site and smartphone Googlebot from your desktop site.

See under the "Don’t Block Mobile Sites With Robots.txt" heading for that particular bit, though there's a lot of other stuff at that article.