Proper way to redirect an old mobile subdomain?

[smithaa02]

So the old system we had was that for desktop clients we had:

mainwebsite.com

Then for mobile clients we had:

mobile.mainwebsite.com (robots.txt blocked all search engine indexing)

We just re-launched mainwebsite.com as a responsive website and no longer need a device switching setup and subdomain.

To this end, we now resolve mobile.mainwebsite.com to the IP of the new mainwebsite and with a .htaccess file 301'ed all these requests to the homepage of mainwebsite.com.

From an SEO perspective, is this incorrect?

[phranque]

from an SEO perspective that is called a soft 404.
there is plenty of discussion about that in this forum.

[not2easy]

Soft 404s are not good for a site, you should never redirect people who expected to see the page they clicked on (or the link or bookmark) to take them to your new home page so they need to navigate to find the page they came to see. That is not a good user experience.

In the htaccess file your 301 can capture the page request and add it to the new URL so if they visit "mobile.example.com/page-about-something.html" they will go to "example.com/page-about-something.html" and everyone is happy.

[lucy24]

Crucial question that you forgot to answer: Apart from the hostname (example.com vs. mobile.example.com) are the two sets of URLs the same? If yes, you can and should redirect page for page; it will only take two or three lines of code. If the URL structures are different, it will take some more work, but should still be doable.

[smithaa02]

The thing is the old domain redirected to the mobile (which is how mobile device switching works.

So if somebody with an iphone goes to mainwebsite.com, their agent was detected and they were redirected to mobile.mainwebsite.com.

mobile.mainwebsite.com was never indexed (because of a robots.txt file) and nobody really expected to go there anyways since they were always redirected from mainwebsite.com

Now that mainwebsite.com is responsive and doesn't need mobile.mainwebsite.com, I'm redirecting the latter to the former (kind of in reverse). I don't see this as an issue as the mobile subdomain was never indexed. Plus wouldn't this be like when a corporation buys up another corporaton and redirects their old site to the new master corporate site? That can't hurt... I'm not looking to recoup any page juice from the mobile site (there was none), but just to corral some of the stragglers that may have book marked the old mobile subdomain pages.

[phranque]

you want a custom 404/410 error page.

[lucy24]

The thing is the old domain redirected to the mobile (which is how mobile device switching works).

Hm. How things are, and how things should be, is not always the same thing. Did a request for
example.com/directory/pagename
from a detected mobile device lead to
mobile.example.com/
? Marginally acceptable if they were entirely different sites with no equivalence in URLs. Otherwise, you should not have been doing that either.

It doesn't matter whether the mobile subdomain was indexed. What matters is if humans used the mobile subdomain.

wouldn't this be like when a corporation buys up another corporaton and redirects their old site to the new master corporate site

Corporations aren't exempt from doing things the wrong way. If you request example.uk (root) and they've been bought by example.jp, then sure, redirect to the root. But if they request example.uk/widgets/productname and there's an equivalent page at the new example.jp, then that's where they should get redirected to.

:: shuffling papers ::

[xkcd.com...]

[bwnbwn]

My 1st question would be. Did all the new pages on the responsive match the old pages/urls?
If the answer is yes then Lucy is spot on. The old mobile should be redirected to the new url on the responsive website. It is indexed and this is IMO the best way it should be done.

if the answer is no what did you do?