John Mueller of Google said the other day on a Google hangout on YouTube at the 25:16 mark that if you do plan on migrating from an m-dot (i.e. http://m.domain.com) to a responsive mobile friendly design, then it is best to do it before the mobile first index launches. There is no rush, we got time but he did say the move would be way easier now than later.
Why, well, Google indexes your desktop site, so moving an m-dot doesn't do much to the current index because Google doesn't really fully index your m-dot. When Google does go mobile-first, then they will index it and then a migration like this would be like a full site migration that can take months to process.
Hat tip:
Via @johnmu Planning to migrate from an m. to responsive site, do it BEFORE the m-first index arrives https://t.co/TS0UXLQxu8 h/t @DeepCrawl pic.twitter.com/TisF3pMT5t
— Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) June 19, 2017
The Question:
How to handle a migration from an m-dot site to a response site.
The Answer:
This is something where, essentially at the moment, it is fairly easy to do in the sense that you just redirect from the m-dot version to the main responsive version. And if you are just redirecting your mobile pages then that is something that shouldn’t be affecting search at all. In the sense that for indexing we use your desktop pages anyway, so we wouldn’t see any redirects there. It wouldn’t be the case that you are moving something with the canonical pages with the desktop pages but rather you are moving kind of the associated page to the same as the canonical page. So doing a redirect there is absolutely the right thing. This is something that should be fairly straight forward and should be fairly easy to do.With the mobile first index, when that comes, obviously that will be a bit different. Because that will be like your are moving your canonical page to a different URL. So that is something where if you plan on doing a change from an m-dot site to a responsive site it is probably a lot easier to do that now then to wait until the mobile first index has come out. Because with the mobile first index moving the canonical pages, which means you are doing kind of a site migration, which means you will see a lot more fluctuation as it gets processed.
Here is the video embed:
Forum discussion at Twitter.
