What is your mobile website strategy?

[MagicDude4Eva]

Do you have one where you deliver the same content to the desktop (rich user experience) as well as mobile websites?

In our case we provide content to www.domain.com, m.domain.com (for smart phones not using our native apps) and mo.domain.com (for older feature phones). We found that in some instances Google favours the indexing of our mobile content over our desktop site and we have now started pointing canonical content to our desktop site (i.e. to www.domain.com).

Possible downside is that Google might not present desktop indexed content on mobile devices. This is not really a big issue, as currently Google presents mobile content for desktop searches.

A better approach would have been responsive design, but we feel that dedicated apps will rule the mobile device space and desktop-websites will evolve to allow content to be displayed on all devices (we consider our m.domain.com and mo.domain.com stop-gaps to overcome legacy device issues and bandwidth limitations).

What is your mobile device strategy with regards to SEO?

[Marcus_Miller]

Hey Gerd

I tend to feel that in most cases a responsive design is going to be the best approach or failing that, an automated mobile site much like WPTouch for WordPress.

There are lots of reasons why I feel different mobile sites are a bad approach and just the physical management of two (or three) sites along with the optimisation etc is reason enough for most businesses to want to simplify their approach with a responsive site.

As ever though, there are always a lot of moving parts and the right answer is the answer that is right for the specific business. For us, we use WPTouch on the back of WordPress and will be moving to a fully responsive site when we next do a redesign.

I rattled out some of my thoughts on mobile sites and SEO here:

http://www.bowlerhat.co.uk/blog/responsive-web-design/

I think the very fact that responsive is Google's preferred approach is reason enough for most people to take that approach. Couple that with the simplification in the management and reduced workload over running multiple sites then it is the most common sense option for most folks.

Of course, this does not stop you serving up content via specific applications on smart phones and other devices but that is really outside the scope of SEO considerations.

Just my tuppence / 5 cents!

Cheers
Marcus