Does creating a mobile site in html5 create duplicate content?

[sfseo]

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 not create duplicate content?

[STPseo]

You are correct. Google serves up the same results to smart phones and desktop computers. What they recommend is use the same site and use the style sheet to control the mobile display. In other words, not making a separate site for mobile. Here is a snippet from a Google & A.

John Mueller - @Paul If you have "smartphone" content (which we see as normal web-content, as it's generally a normal HTML page, just tweaked in layout for smaller displays) you can use the rel=canonical to point to your desktop version. This helps us to focus on the desktop version for web-search. When users visit that desktop version with a smartphone, you can redirect them to the mobile version. This works regardless of the URL structure, so you don't need to use subdomains / subdirectories for smartphone-mobile sites. Even better however is to use the same URLs and to show the appropriate version of the content without a redirect :). Here is the entire article where I found the snippet.

The other option would be to make the mobile pages and canonical those back to the corresponding main site pages. This way you don't have duplicate content and you have more SEO juice flow to the main site.

In my opinion, I wouldn't even worry too much about "traditional" cell phones. I found since the beginning of the year, on STP, we've only had 1 or 2 sales via dumb phones and only a fraction of traffic compared with smart phones.

[sfseo]

Thanks alot for the response Stephen, much appreciated. I read the entire article you suggested and found all the answers I needed in the comments section. Ashamed I didn't find the article myself before posting the question! Tired eyes

I agree with you, smartphones are our only real concern going forward.