Building a mobile site.

[SEO-Team]

We are building a mobile site that will be launching in another month. I’m concerned that the mobile site will start catabolizing our traditional rankings. Is there a way to keep this from happening? Should we utilize the cross domain canonical tag and point back to the traditional site URLs?

[AdoptionHelp]

If your content is exactly the same a canonical tag will help prevent the cannibalizing you're worried about. But if it is exactly the same, you should maybe ask why you're making a separate site instead of serving up different stylesheets based on the user-agent?

As always, I like to refer back to the Googlers themselves, so I recommend checking out: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/02/making-websites-mobile-friendly.html

Edit: Also this video from Matt Cutts: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mY9h3G8Lv4k

[SteveOllington]

Or... just don't bother!

Make your original site mobile-friendly and dump the idea for a whole separate site. There really is no need, .mobi or otherwise.

Plus, then you'll have to sites you have to get links for, when you could combine all those links into one site and get more bang for your buck.