SEO advice when making a mobile site

[KennethDreyer]

Hi there,

I'm current working on a site that is optimized for SEO and doing quite well in the rankings.

We have noticed a big increase in mobile users to the site (mainly iOS and Android), so we have no started planning a mobile site as well.

Do you guys have any recommendations we should keep in mind before we get started? One thing I'm still not sure of is whether we should aim to preserve all urls and cloak the pages (show mobile version to iOS and Android, and desktop version to everyone else) OR make a separate site for the mobile version (mobile.domain.com)? Would either solution affect the other?

Regards,
Kenneth

[john4math]

I don't have an explicit answer to this, but this article discusses these issues and links to several different sources.  In particular, this video with Matt Cutts.  According to Matt, it sounds like it's good to have a different URL like you suggested for mobile sites.

If you have two different URLs, make sure that the regular Googlebot spiders your main site, and Googlebot-Mobile spiders your mobile site.

If you serve your regular and mobile pages under the same URL, then you need to make sure you serve the mobile version to Googlebot-Mobile to get those pages indexed properly.

Hope this helps!

[KennethDreyer]

Thank you for your response.

Technically, it's not a problem making either of the two options and making sure Googlebot is served the correct version. What I'm curious about is the SEO effect of using the same URLs and how it will affect usability. I know I always get a bit annoyed when someone sends me a link from their mobile that sends me to the mobile-friendly version and I'm on a desktop.

Also, what about external and offline advertising where you want to link to domain.com/product. Would it be better to redirect or cloak?

[john4math]

Yeah... you'd probably want to redirect those offline advertising URLs depending on the device being used.  Unless your site is primarily mobile, you'll probably want to distribute your regular URLs in offline advertising, not URLs with mobile.example.com.

For usability, you should have links to go between the two version of the site.  What would be even better is if you did this: set a cookie when you change the version of the site you're on, to prevent the redirect in the future.  So if you change from the default version of the site from the version that we think you would want for your device, and come back to that site later, we'll use the version you selected.

For example, if a user prefers the desktop version on their iPad, the first time they go to your site it'll take them to the mobile version.  Once they click the link for the desktop version, they'll always receive pages from the desktop version of your site (for 1 year unless you renew the cookie or they clear their cookies).  This will work even if they click a new link to your site from search result pages.