Do search enginges prefer pages with mobile websites on the mobile phone?

[petrakraft]

Let me explain what I want to know:

Somebody searches e.g. for a hotel on his mobile phone. Do the search engines rank websites with special mobile pages better than others? I am not considering the local factor here (let's say there are hotels nearby with or without mobile websites).

If not, is there a trend for that?

Does anyone have some datas / examples / experience about that?

[Getz.pro]

Good question. The rub here is what would determine a good mobile site that the SEs would want to return more than the full site?

What if a site has no benifit having a mobile site vs. a full site? Using your example of a hotel, what benifits would an SE notice? Faster page loads? Sure. Better navigation? Can they determine that?

What I am getting at is that a mobile site is not necessarily better that the full site. Example being Facebook. They have a horrible mobile site. So I do not see why an SE would be bias to that. They might rank the mobile site instead of the full site when on mobile platforms.

BTW, I did a search on my iMac and iPhone for local hotels and Google returned the same results.

Cheers

[goodnewscowboy]

Hi Petra: I'm hoping someone with mobile experience jumps in, but I remembbered reading a post from Cindy Krum (suzzicks) about mobile sites that might address your question. I'll have to just give you the URL as the Q&A text box is a bit wonky for my browser:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/mobile-search-engine-transcoding

[Dan-Petrovic]

I haven't gone in-depth with this but from my own observations the situation was clear. Presence of mobile version of the site will set Google's preference on choice of which site to display and not affect the actual position.

Has anyone tested to see if links to mobile site page version count towards the standards site and vice versa?

[ninjamarketer]

Not seen a huge correlation between ranking and mobile site or Google display mobile pages on mobile devices instead of web pages. There have been some studies that show the differences though.

However, I personally lean more towards building a mobile site because I am big proponent of usability and I don't feel that at the current state normal web pages are mobile friendly. I believe that soon there will not be any difference in mobile and web pages when all of the sites will be designed to be universally accesible and this could result in mobile site bulding being obsolete but until then mobile sites are important.

Here are some good reports about mobile usability and how it differs from web usaiblity

http://www.esprockets.com/papers/kamvar-baluja.chi06.pdf

http://www.useit.com/alertbox/mobile-usability.html

Hope this helps.

Thanks

Sameer

[CharlesMontgomery]

This is a great question, and one for which I searching for answers. The company that I do in house SEO for has a mobile version of the website on a subfolder. The mobile site has around 8,000 pages indexed. However, when I search google from my android it only returns results for the non-mobile version of the site.

I thought google would appreciate us taking the time to create a mobile site, and reward us by displaying the mobile version in their mobile search results. As far as google is concerned, the only way to get to the mobile site is to find the mobile link on our regular site. Again, 8,000 mobile pages are indexed in google (and I have verified this).

[randfish]

My experience has been that the answer is (unfortunately) - sometimes.

There appear to be some cases where Google's algo does bias toward mobile-friendly and mobile-specific versions of pages, and other times where they appear to have little to no impact. It's hard to pin down when, where and why, but I suspect things like browser version on the phone, the type of device and Google's interpretation of the query and its specificity to needing a mobile version all play a role.

I will say that over the past few years, I've seen less and less mobile-specific biasing and rewarding by Google. I wrote about this here - http://www.seomoz.org/blog/whats-the-future-of-mobile-search-and-seo

Hope that helps!

[petrakraft]

Thank you for your reply

[jmueller]

Hello Petra,

The "right" question to ask would rather be - how will this be in the (close) future - and the answer is that it will be more and more important to have mobile optimized versions.

You should use a rel=canonical back to your desktop/web version though. Here's an excellent QA which hints at what I wrote above as well: http://www.seroundtable.com/single-url-mobile-seo-13521.html
It's okay to redirect to a subdomain or subfolder but if you aim for the 100% you should not (it's not always possible, I know).

best regards,
Jan