Will Google bots crawl tablet optimized pages of our site?

[kbbseo]

We are in the process of creating a tablet experience for a portion of our site. We haven’t yet decided if we will use a one URL structure for pages that will have a tablet experience or if we will create separate URLs that can only be access by tablet users. Either way, will the tablet versions of these pages/URLs be crawled by Google bots?

[djlaidler]

KBB,

When you implement a mobile site you will need to detect what device is being used to request the Page. This is typically done by checking the USER-AGENT. Google has changed their view point on how to best serve up a mobile site over the past couple of years opting for a responsive design over a separate site (m.site.com). A responsive design can also be done by working to the dimensions of the browser. Although all these options are acceptable, if the site serves up from the same urls but is styled differently depending on the USER-AGENT or dimensions there is no need to block pages from the m. site with robots.txt or run a separate code base.

Google with only crawl the site with a preset USER-AGENT, therefore only viewing the content one way.

Good this helps,

Dan

[retailgeek]

You'll want to use Vary HTTP header in your pages to tell google that you have different code for different user-agents:

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Content-Type: text/html
Vary: User-Agent
Content-Length: 5710
(... rest of HTTP response headers...)

Be sure you understand the pitfalls of user-agent detection as explained by Gogole here:

https://developers.google.com/webmasters/smartphone-sites/redirects