SEO for mobile sites?

[JaanMSonberg]

Let's say I have an ecommerce site and it has a separate theme via device detection. So I may even have different content on the pages. So for example, on desktop, on mysite.com/flowers I have a video about flowers. But on mobile, I have 10 000 words of text. Will this page rank better for people searching via mobile? Will google give different search rankings, based on desktop vs. mobile? Or how is Google calculating this? Are there any good mobile SEO tips or a knowhow base?

[Andy.Drinkwater]

Hi Jaan,

This is probably a good place to start. Loads of useful information about mobile SEO.

http://searchengineland.com/the-definitive-guide-to-mobile-technical-seo-166066

-Andy

[SajeetNair]

Matt,

On the mobile front simply focus on the users and UI.

On the SEO front, you just need to do the following -

• Place user agent specific redirects
• Place canonical tags on the mobile pages to the corresponding pages of desktop

This will ensure that you are not hit by duplicate content penalty and at the same time user experience is not hampered.

With the exception of local results, the search landscape on the organic front for mobiles as well as desktop is not majorly varied.

Hope this helps.

• Sajeet

[KristinaKledzik]

Hm, there are a lot of subtleties in here.

First, if you have mysite.com/flowers and m.mysite.com/flowers with completely different content on them, Google is not going to think they're the same page. They'll rank differently based on their own merits, and Google will probably rank _bot__h _of them for desktop and mobile. Google wants to give searchers access to all content across the web, so if you have two pages with different information, it'll show them as two resources.

Now, if you follow mobile best practices, you'll make m.mysite.com/flowers rel="canonical" to mysite.com/flowers, and rel="alternate" mysite.com/flowers to m.mysite.com/flowers. In that case, you're telling Google that mysite.com/flowers is the original source of information, and m.mysite.com/flowers is the same information presented differently. In that case, Google will only rank mysite.com/flowers for desktop searches and m.mysite.com/flowers for mobile searches. I'm not 100% sure how Google will handle the differing content in this case, but my guess is, it'll rank m.mysite.com/flowers as well as mysite.com/flowers would rank for the search, but it'll use the page title, URL, and meta description from m.mysite.com/flowers.

Like Andy said, Search Engine Land has a great guide to mobile SEO. I also wrote a guide that's more broadly about building a good mobile site and not just about SEO: https://www.distilled.net/training/mobile-seo-guide/

What's your real question behind all this? Are you building a mobile site and planning on making it significantly different than your desktop site? In that case, I'd recommend that you don't. If you have a video about flowers and 10,000 words of text on it, but both on your /flowers page and allow desktop and mobile visitors to access both. Generally, you want your mobile site experience to be as close as possible to the experience of browsing your desktop site. Otherwise, it's just confusing.