Google's John Mueller explained in this weeks Google webmaster hangout video that if you have a separate M-DOT site it's more likely that Google might show your M-DOT version in the normal desktop search results. This can be corrected by redirecting Google yourself or going responsive he said.
He said "So from from our point of view with an MDOT site with mobile first indexing it's more likely that you would see the MDOT version in the desktop search results." He added "So it's something where we would expect that potentially if you have an MDOT site this will kind of remain in a kind of an unstable situation like this."
Here is the video embed that starts at the 14:08 mark:
Here is the transcript:
One of the things that is worth mentioning is that especially with the shift to mobile first indexing, if you have a separate MDOT site it's more likely that something like this can happen, in that we might show your MDOT version in the normal desktop search results.And often that's due to kind of an inconsistent linking between the mobile and the desktop version where we can't map that exactly. Sometimes it's just a matter of kind of the way that we crawl and index pages. Where maybe we'll pick up one version first and we'll see the canonical and we'll stick with the MDOT version because kind of the one that we would choose as canonical there and we would show that.
So from from our point of view with an MDOT site with mobile first indexing it's more likely that you would see the MDOT version in the desktop search results.
Because of that what I would do is make sure that you redirect desktop users from the MDOT site to the appropriate desktop site, wait, desktop users to the mobile site to the appropriate desktop version. So kind of catch it on your end rather than rely on Google showing the appropriate URL.
This is a bit similar to the situation before mobile first indexing where sometimes we would show desktop URLs for an MDOT site on mobile. And essentially it has just kind of shifted around here.
And this is something from from the mobile first indexing team. I talked with them about this earlier today. And from their point of view we we do try to catch this as much as we can but we can't catch it completely. And at the moment we're thinking that this is probably something that over time will become less of an issue anyway because people will redirect and more and more people are using mobile anyway to search. So it's something where we would expect that potentially if you have an MDOT site this will kind of remain in a kind of an unstable situation like this.
Again what I would just do there is make sure that you redirect from the MDOT version to the desktop version for desktop users. That also helps us to understand that connection better and to show the right URL at the right time. So that's kind of the the best way to handle it or rather be the easiest way to handle it. Of course the best way to handle it would be to use a responsive site.
Forum discussion at YouTube.
