Question relates to mobile site & duplicate content.

[OlivierChateau]

We are working on the mobile version of a large site (migraine.com) and will be using a separate theme for it (directing visitors to m.migraine.com)- what are the necessary code or other important step we should take so that we do get penalized for having duplicate content? Thank you in advance for your responses

[AlanBleiweiss]

1.  Detect crawler type.  If it's the mobile googlebot, and it comes to the regular site, redirect it to the mobile site.  If the regular googlebot comes to the mobile site, redirect it to the regular site. You should also do this as a best practice based on all visitor browser types.  It's not cloaking, it's serving up the proper version of the site to the source it belongs with. You can see Matt Cutt's help video on this subject here.

2.Create a mobile sitemap file and submit it to Google and Bing.

If you do this properly, you should not have any problems with duplicate content because they're sophisticated enough to understand that you're not trying to serve up two sets of content to the same visitor type.

[sfseo]

Interesting point! However, we are creating a mobile site in html5 to serve smartphones only. On a seperate domain, m.example.com. From what I have read Google treats smartphones as desktops due to thier advanced web browser capabilities.

So no need to bother with googlebot.mobile right? Googlebot should index
the site once I create a normal sitemap.xml. My concern is that the mobile site
pulls the same content as the main site which is already indexed.

Would this create duplicate content? If so, what can I do?