: Noindex metatag in alternate mobile version of page with canonical to desktop... What consequences? I have a desktop site to serve content for desktop and tablet users. I also have a mobile

@Candy875

What happens if your configuration will be detected by a search engine:


Mixing canonical links and noindex will mostly lead to search engines ignoring your canonicals. This may lead to duplicate content issues if you also have canonicalized dynamic URLs or alike.
Without the canonicals being respected properly the search engines will decide which url is for mobile and which is not on their own. This may increase bounces from your landing pages as users are sent to the wrong url.
Further you will have duplicate content issues with those URLs serving the same content for mobile as the desktop equivalents do.
This may lead to worse rankings as your page may be considered not mobile friendly, user signals are bad and DC issues appear.
Crawling will end if your misconfigured URLs are reached as the pages are set to "nofollow". This will lead to less pages being crawled as they are a dead end for the crawler. Second, as you already mentioned the "noindex" will lead to the pages being deindexed sooner or later.


As your page already is misconfigured it may already suffer from the issues mentioned above.

If you correct the canonicals and meta tags things will rather become better than becoming worse if you don't change the configuration.

In order to avoid problems like this it's always recommended to serve mobile and desktop versions on the same url. This makes rel="alternate" unnecessary and makes ist easier to maintain the canonicals.

To sum it up:


canonicals will be ignored
duplicate content issues will appear
mobile friendliness may suffer
crawling will be not ideal


All this leads to worse rankings compared to a properly configured page.

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