Mobile Web Sites

[ocelot]

Hi

I have started offering customers a mobile app view of their existing websites using sencha touch which works well.

On visiting the website if a user visits via a mobile device they access the mobile app view of the site.

I am looking for some best practice please - as many of the customers already have hosting with their existing website so would it be possible to use a subdomain of

m.theirdomain.com

which will point to the mobile website which will be hosted on our servers in the cloud.

Or is the only alternative to use a subdomain for their mobile sites because they are hosted with us in the cloud of

businessname.ourdomain.com  ?

Many Thanks

[KaneJamison]

I personally don't like the use of subdomains for mobile content, unless there's some sort of functionality that makes it a much different site than the desktop version. If subdomains are done incorrectly it can cause issues with duplicate content and splitting link value between mobile and normal.  I'm going to paste a response I wrote for a different question regarding mobile redirection here:

If it's a normal website, not something dynamic that requires HTML5 / app-style functionality, then the best practice in my opinion is to display a different stylesheet based upon device (screen size, basically). This avoids duplicate content issues, rel canonical implementation, and page authority getting split between normal & mobile versions of the site.

Check out this article from Smashing Magazine regarding designing for mobile:

http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2...

The section marked "CLIENT-SIDE METHODS & MEDIA QUERIES" explains how to do it, it's basically paraphrasing the original article on A List Apart.

[ocelot]

Thanks for the reply - but I feel this space is moving toward more app like mobile views hence the platforms like jquerymobile / senchatouch coming more to the fore.

If you have a .mobi version of the site built on the jquerymobile platform will Google understand that its a mobile version of the site therefore there would be no duplicate content issues?  or do you need to carry out additional steps?

[KaneJamison]

Which direction things are headed is very dependent on the type of websites you're building and the type of clients you're serving.  A mobile stylesheet is much more feasible in many situations, and provides quite a few SEO benefits as outlined above. Here is a quote from Google Engineer John Mueller stating that single URL is preferred.

That said, if you're going to go the route of m.domain.com, then you need to implement rel="canonical" on the mobile site and the desktop site, with the desktop site URL being the canonical URL.

Make sure you have a proper redirect on the desktop version of the site that sends mobile users over to the m.domain.com version. From there, I would read the two Google resources below to make sure the Google Mobile Bot can access everything, and you should be good to go.

More Relevant Resources:

Google's Guide to SEO PDF (Scroll to page 24): http://www.google.com/webmasters/docs/search-engine-optimization-starter-guide.pdf

GWT Post on Making Websites Mobile Friendly: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/02/making-websites-mobile-friendly.html