OK, this is an interesting – and valid concern you’ve raised.
We could certainly add it to the plugin as an option (default presumably to nofollow always?)
The downside of course will be Google’s ability to know you have a mobile site. What normally happens (for me, anyway) is that the mobile pages turn up on Google’s mobile search, and the desktop pages on the desktop.
If you are merely trying to remove the query-string from the URL, that may be feasible, but may depend on whether you are using distinct domains for your mobile/desktop variants or not.
I’m sorry you think it’s as bad as a ‘mess’ – but let’s get this fixed in a amenable way.
Thanks
It sounds like you are thinking of adding a meta nofollow tag rather than a rel=”nofollow” to the ‘switch to desktop’ link?
When I first tested the plugin on my LG phone and did a search on Google Mobile for my site, Google used it’s own formatting and ignored the plugin by default. So I never considered that.
I’m assuming Google can still travel through the site and see the proper mobile headers without following and indexing the wpmp_switcher=desktop type links.
Sorry if I came off harsh, other than the duplicate pages being indexed by Google, it looks like a great plugin.
Though, upon reflextion, I’m guessing it’s not such an easy fix. I’m assuming the spider goes to the mobile view. If it thinks all your main urls are mobile pages, than it’s only option is to index the ‘switch to desktop’ links for the regular directory.
That might explain why it seemed to prefer to index something like http://mysite.com/?p=#&wpmp_switcher=desktop instead of http://mysite.com/?p=#.
I installed and then uninstalled the mobile pack because it made my site into two sites both with and without www, e.g. domain.com and http://www.domain.com would show as www and non-www in the browser, while before both were redirected to http://www.domain.com.
Upon uninstall I now have 3 sets of URLs indexed by Google:
one plain set, domain.com
one mobile set, domain.com+switcher=mobile
one desktop set, domain.com+switcher=desktop
While it does not really matter since they all default to the correct URL, it annoys me that I now have a triple indexing that I must edit in Google’s index, so that only the plain URL shows up.
What also annoys me is that the mobile/desktop version of my URLs has ignored the noindex setting I have put up on my tag and category pages. The plain URLs (before) were noindex, the desktop/mobile versions are not, how come?
The plugin as such worked flawlessly, but I lost control over my URLs, and I now have to spend endless hours to fix it…
I am sorry for any trouble with Google, of course we don’t have control over what they do with their index.
Could you explain better what you mean about the noindex? Was it an attribute of the anchor? Was it in your robots.txt?
One thing that we could do for the future is make the switcher link to the mobile version a nofollow so that Google and other robots will not follow it. Of course this means that they will not index your mobile site unless you specifically tell the robot to do it. In theory Google and other search engines say they will figure out themselves if the site is mobile or not, obviously it’s not as smooth as they say 🙂
