[Plugin: WordPress Mobile Pack] Switcher Link / Duplicate content problem?

You make a good point.

I havent looked at the function but you might want to take it one step further and add the following to the header of the theme you’re using for the mobile version of your site:

<meta name="robots" content="noindex" />

That way the page wont even get indexed. Nofollow doesn’t stop search engines from following the link, it just tells them you don’t trust the link.

Good idea, but wouldn’t that also stop mobile bots from indexing the mobile site?
Maybe it would work out better if noindex was shown only to mobile bots browsing desktop sites as well as desktop bots browsing mobile sites.

Though that would only help SEO if different versions of content for mobile and desktop bots don’t count as duplicate content or content cloaking. Since different content versions for mobile and desktop make a lot of sense from a user experience point of view, I hope they don’t cause any problems.

You’re correct that it would stop mobile bots also from indexing the site. It definitely depends on what you’re trying to accomplish with your mobile site.

I’m not sure what the impact is if you load up your page with handheld specific meta tags and such and how google sees that but I think if your site is just a mobile compliant version of your desktop site then just noindex the mobile version. Better than facing duplicate content penalties.

It may make sense, if you have differing content for mobile and desktop users to have your homepage redirect mobile users to a domain or subfolder for mobile content. That may help google understand your site structure properly and I would then allow google to crawl both sites.

I was getting the same even after removing the plugin. In google webmasters tool you can tell google to ignore certain parameters : wpmp_switcher. I just added all the different versions of the switcher parameter