Should I NOINDEX my mobile pages?

Seems like a safe bet, but does it hurt my mobile rankings?

[maximillianos]

The ever-popular question of duplicate content and mobile sites.

I want to be safe. Should I NOINDEX all my mobile pages? If so, does it matter if I submit a mobile sitemap to Google?

Or should I submit a mobile sitemap to the search engines and allow the pages to be indexed?

What is the best practice here? I'm having trouble finding an authoritative answer.

Thanks for any help/advice/direction on this!

[maximillianos]

Answer: No! ;-)

[Musicarl]

Max, I never got a good answer on this, but when we put up a mobile version of our main site about 2 years ago, Google indexed some of the pages in their main index which caused lots of problems - it cut our page rank in half and it still hasn't come back.

We had the correct headers, the m.example.com subdomain and a mobile sitemap, but Google mangled it anyway and I still don't know why. The canonical tag wasn't around back then, but I would definitely use that now, and it might protect you. We had to noindex to get them out of the main serps.

At this point, I'm not sure a mobile site is worth it, especially in a world of apps.

[maximillianos]

Yeah the canonical tag makes a lot of sense for mobile pages. We also submitted a mobile sitemap. It was very confusing to sift through all the varying opinions on mobile site design. Hopefully we got it right. Great point on the apps. We are looking to build an iPhone and android app next.