Hi guys, I have an e-commerce site that has a mobile site on a sub-directory (mysite.com/m/) Is this something I should be blocking via robots.txt to avoid duplicate content and competing with the desktop version of the site (the entire /m/ sub directory, or should I allow this to be crawled and indexed? What would the determining factors be to influence the decision in one direction or another. If you need more information just ask Thanks for the help
Basically by creating a mobile version you allow handheld users to access site... these users also perform searches using google, yahoo and other search tools available on their particular devices.. now what you're doing is creating a site for these users but stopping them to access it. By placing a blocked /m/ verrsion you're just wasting time and nothing else.... Using mobile markeups is the most efficient way.... don't create separate directory.... follow the guidelines here http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=72462
But since it is already set up in a subdirectory, /m/, if that is unblocked via robots.txt, is there a risk of having duplicate pages (desktop vs mobile) competing for rankings, or causing confusion for Google in figuring out which page to rank
As long as it's unblocked by robots.txt, it should not cause duplication, neither confusion for Google... It will take your normal pages on priority