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The question is somewhat similar to this post. The only difference is, we have desktop version as https://www.example.com/ and mobile version as https://www.example.com/m/. The desktop page has mobile link in alternate tag and mobile page has desktop link in its canonical.

I have few doubts here:

  1. Would mobile website be crawled by google? I see some mobile pages are being crawled by google and some are not.
  2. Should the pages be identical i.e. these two pages are registration form and its short on mobile website but lengthy on desktop. So is it correct to have desktop link as canonical in the mobile website as these two are actually bit different for user and for bots too? Would google penalize us for this?
  3. If i change title, keywords on mobile website, would it impact seo? Can any change on mobile website impact SEO OR googlebots/crawler would only see Desktop version to rank our website?
  4. Is it correct to put mobile link in desktop's alternate tag AND desktop link in mobile's canonical tag? Should there be any other tags to link these two entities?
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  • Please limit your questions to just one specific on in the future and ask multiple ones individually instead. You can reference questions if they're related to one another.
    – dan ♦
    Commented Jun 1, 2017 at 0:41

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I have worked with websites using the approach you are mentioning. Here's my take:

  1. Yes, it will be crawled and indexed (if you have internal links to all pages).
  2. They should be identical if you are telling search engines where the same alternative mobile page is located, and you are using a canonical link from mobile version. They should be as as identical as possible but you can of course adapt the contents to be mobile friendly. By that I mean that they can sometimes contain bit less text, shorter forms and/or other css. I doubt that you'd be penalized unless they differ a lot i.e. totally different content.
  3. The title, yes for the mobile index results. With keywords, if you mean the old meta keywords tag(?) it wouldn't have any seo effect at all. But if you mean keywords in the content, that would certainly have effect. Desktop version is still the dominant page/version and its content have big effect. But we are getting closer to a mobile first index. That would give extra weight to your mobile pages instead.
  4. Yes, that is the correct way of doing it if you're not designing a responsive website structure where the same page adapts to the screen size/device. You don't need other tags in terms of seo. This is how Google describes it: https://developers.google.com/webmasters/mobile-sites/mobile-seo/

Good luck @sahil

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