Mobile Site & SEO

[Cyrus-Shepard]

Hi Waqid,

Yes, if you create a mobile site that is accessible, search engines may discover and crawl it. There is a lot of debate surrounding this, but if they discover duplicate content, you might be dinged in the rankings.

This is a problem with 10,000 solutions.The best practice today, and one that search engines are leaning towards, is a SINGLE URL approach, in which you use CSS style sheets and HTML5 to get your content to display correctly across all browsers, both desktop and mobile.

In reality, this is often more difficult than is practical, so workarounds are required. At a minimum, if you do build separate pages for mobile, make sure they contain the rel=canonical tag pointing to the original URL of your main site. That way, if a search engine discovers these pages, they won't penalize you for duplicate content and will be able to give proper attribution.

Bryson Meunier has a blog on the subject of mobile SEO that's pretty insightful. You can find it here.

http://www.brysonmeunier.com/

Hope this helps! Best of luck with your SEO.

[waqid]

There is the solution. I will add it to my robots.txt and use a no index attribute..........That i think is the easiest.

It would be nice to continue this discussion to see what everyone else has to say : ]

[skrauss]

This actually isn't true. Google has indexed mobile sites for years and showed them when relevant. But now with Google's Old Possum/Skip Redirect update in December you start to see a lot more mobile URLs ranking in smartphone search where desktop URLs were previously. Screenshots of Old Possum in the wild here: http://www.brysonmeunier.com/skip-redirectold-possum-in-google-smartphone-search-results/

[skrauss]

Cyrus, thanks for the mention. Appreciate it.

Glad to see more people talking about mobile SEO. I agree responsive web design can work well for duplicate pages, but I think there's often a case to be made for dedicated mobile content. I also think SEOs in general are too concerned with splitting link equity between desktop and mobile sites when mobile sites can rank without link equity with Google's Skip Redirect/Old Possum update in December. I have a mobile search column in Search Engine Land where I discussed responsive design and SEO if you're interested in learning more: http://searchengineland.com/for-mobile-seo-ask-what-do-mobile-searchers-need-116072

The best way to build a mobile site for better visibility in search is really to build a hybrid of responsive pages and dedicated mobile content. I've detailed the process here: http://searchengineland.com/how-to-best-optimize-your-mobile-site-for-seo-112940

[skrauss]

I really wouldn't recommend this as you're potentially making your site invisible to smartphone searchers. Googlebot mobile is Google's featurephone crawler and smartphone searchers usually get a variation of the desktop index. There's no need to use robots.txt at all if you properly redirect Googlebot mobile and smartphone Googlebot, as the right pages will be presented to the right searchers.

[skrauss]

Popular tactic, but usually makes a site less visible to mobile searchers, not more. Wrote in Search Engine Land last year about how disallowing their mobile site made Home Depot nearly impossible to find in search here: http://searchengineland.com/why-mobile-friendly-is-not-mobile-seo-66192

Better to properly redirect user agents, including Googlebot mobile and smartphone Googlebot as Google explains here: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/12/introducing-smartphone-googlebot-mobile.html

[Cyrus-Shepard]

Thanks Bryson - appreciate your insight - and am always happy to get your input on mobile SEO.

[BoxLimited]

Google will crawl a mobile site as long as it has a good site architecture and contains content that is relevant to what mobile users are searching for.  It is important that when creating a mobile site to include a mobile sitemap as this will tell Google that you are targeting mobile users and index the websites according to the various handsets.

The key points to a mobile site are:

Relevant Pages Titles and Descriptions
Appropriate keywords in content Clean HTML coding

[echo1]

Hi Cyrus, I hit the same road block and I was wondering if you still stick to your comment above for 2013.

[Rich_Coffman]

I just saw a huge jump for rank on a keyword and went to the SERPs to verify it and found it to be a mobile version of the page (it does not look pretty).

From what I read, I should put rel=canonical tags on the mobile site's pages that indicate the main website's pages to be the canonical version. Yes?