: Should I block indexing of my mobile site? 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

@Pierce454

Definitely do not block any of Google's crawlers from accessing any version of your site. There are certain edge cases with ad bots and others but in this specific example, you wouldn't want to block.
Use an XML sitemap to add an alternate tag linking your mobile pages to your desktop equivalent pages OR add the canonical and alternate tags to the mobile and desktop pages, respectively. This will explicitly tell Google the 1:1 relationship between both versions.
Housing your mobile site in a directory like /mobile is, in both Google's and my opinion, the least favorable method. It is still ok, but using m.example.com is better and still the best method is making the entire site at example.com responsive.
If you still want to stay with /mobile or move to m.example.com, I recommend adding this location to a new profile in GWT so you can track crawl activity and other performance data on its own. Then, you could be able to assess the damage and see if this is an issue.

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@Twilah146

No problems unless you add rel canonical to point to main website.

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@Kristi941

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.

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@Sent6035632

Have you thought about using a mobile sitemap?


Mobile Sitemaps


Here is an article:


Help Google index your mobile site

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@Shelley277

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

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@Angela700

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:

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

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@Phylliss660

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.

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@Kevin317

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

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