Mobile Theme Switching

[leeg]

Hi -

wondering what one should do with a mobile theme in relationship to Google. We are using wordpress and then a plugin that detects whether or not the user is on a mobile device. Should you no-follow the mobile theme since it is effectively the same content as the main site? Or just leave it be and not worry about it.

Thanks!

[RobertFisher]

Leeg,

First, Good question. Second, what plug-in are you using?

After digesting your question, I went and looked at several of the plug ins for mobile that are avail for WP. The question is does the plugin serve up a separate page for mobile that has a subdomain different from what your site is? So, as it reconfigs the page for mobile, does it also in some way change the url to a mobile url like m.yoursite.com?(This is a best practice according to Matt Cutts)

From reading about one of them it states it can detect the "Googlebot-Mobile" so, I am assuming it is serving up this as the user agent and not the "Googlebot" as user agent. If this is so, then you should not have a problem with content being considered duplicate.

If there is nothing in the literature, I would ask the help desk depending on which plug in you are using.

Hope this helps.

[leeg]

We have been using the WordPress mobile pack plugin (http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wordpress-mobile-pack/). We have been using the WordPress mobile plugin and it’s possible to set as a sub domain m.site.com, sub directory site.com/m, different URL site.mobi / or same URL but the User agent switches the WordPress theme being used.

In theory if the content is slightly different it would be better to use a sub directory rather than a different domain,  and where the content it the same the same URL could be the best answer, but haven’t found a definitive answer on that. It also seems from google’s how to go mobile site that mobile pages can have the same Meta information and do not require a canonical link. http://www.howtogomo.com

I think references to googlebot-mobile are for how google crawls content for feature phones e.g. wap pages, but not sure if this applies to googlebot-for-smartphones which is still quite new and it’s possible to set as a sub domain m.site.com, sub directory site.com/m, different URL site.mobi / or same URL but the User agent switches the WordPress theme being used.

Thanks!