Mobile alternates and redirects

[marianoSoler98]

Hi!

We have a desktop version of our site at http://www.domain.com, and some weeks ago, we launched a mobile edition at http://m.domain.com, replicating the most important sections of the site, but not yet all of them.

Actually, if you access with a mobile device userAgent to any desktop url you are redirected to the home of the mobile web. This is the only redirect implemented about mobile and desktop versions.

A) Shall we also redirect "Googlebot-Mobile" to our mobile site, or it could be considered cloaking?
B) Its necessary to implement the rel="alternate" media="handheld" tag in all of our Desktop SEO URLs? And in our mobile ones? Can't it be implemented via sitemaps like the rel="alternate" hreflang="x" tag?
C) Would the linkbuilding job done on the Desktop version affects the Mobile also, or we would still need to do a separate job?

Thanks!

[wissamdandan]

"Actually, if you access with a mobile device userAgent to any desktop url you are redirected to the home of the mobile web. This is the only redirect implemented about mobile and desktop versions."

any URL from the desktop will be redirected to the homepage of the mobile site? if yes then you need to fix that ..

best practice is domain.com/sample.html to m.domain.com/sample.html ... if pages dont exist yet .. leave it alone and dont add any redirects

A) dont provide any "special" treatments to G Mobi bot . let it crawl your desktop and ur mobile version.

B) the better solution is to create a mobile sitemap and submit in in GWT m.domain.com/sitemap.xml http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=34648&topic=8493&ctx=topic

C) because it resides in a subdomain you will need to do additional work

[marianoSoler98]

About B, and maybe its related to

If we create a separate sitemap, we wouldn't be "saying to Google" that www.domain.com/a its the same page, but different version as m.domain.com/a.

Using alternate media you are telling google that it is the alternate version, not a completely different page; something similar to what happens with hreflang and domain.com / domain.co.uk / domain.de, or with canonical urls