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Rolling out a mobile site for a client and I'm not positive about the following:

1. Do these mobile pages need to be optimized with the same / similar page titles? If we have a product page on the regular site with an optimized title like "Men's Sweaters, Shirts and Ties - Company XYZ", should the mobile version's page have the same title? What if the dev team simply named it "Company XYZ Clothes" and missed the targeted keywords? Does it matter?
2. Along the lines of question 1, isn't there truly just one index and your regular desktop browser version will be used for all ranking factors on both desktop and mobile SERPs?
3. If that regular page indeed ranks well for "men's sweaters" and that term is searched on a mobile device, the visitor will be detected and served up the mobile page version, regardless of its meta tags and authority (say it's on a subdomain, m.example/.com/mens-department/ ), correct?
4. Are meta descriptions necessary for the mobile version? Will the GoogleBot Mobile recognize them or will just the regular version work? Looks like mobile meta descriptions have about 30 less characters.

Thanks in advance. Any advice is appreciated.

• AK

Know of a tool where I can show the overall success of a set of keywords, us vs. the competition? A visibility report where a #1 ranking is worth 30 points, #2 is worth 29, so on and so on down to #30 worth 1 point, outside of the top 30 is worth nothing. (something like this).

Trying to show an overall visibility scorecard, not sure if I can do it here or with some other tool. Didn't see it on Raven.

Thanks!

Say we have a subdomain with resources (resources.site.com) and a partner site (partner.com) and have an agreement to share content (I know - this isn't ideal but it's what I've got to work with).

Please comment on the following:

1. the use of cross-domain canonicals on "shared" articles
2. an intro and/or conclusion paragraph that is unique on the site that re-publishes that could say something like "our partner over at resources.site.com recently published the following report ... yada, yada....."
3. other meta tags to let Google know that we are not scraping, e.g. author tags
4. any other steps we can take to ensure neither site gets "dinged" by the search engines.

Thanks a bunch in advance!

• AK26

I know, I know, you should really create great content that attracts great links, but if you're looking to outsource, what do you think about an outfit like SYNND http://synnd.com/ ?

I'm worried that it may be shady or that the links will end up leaving a footprint and that the links will not help promote the content and only end up hurting rankings. Any thoughts?

Are there any good paid link building services? Not sure who to trust.

Thanks!

Thanks so much, Joe and Anthony. Both answers help!

• AK

Search engines definitely want to see a "healthy balance" of do-follow and no-follow links, so some no-follow anchor text from relevant, authoritative, non-spammy sites is good. Certainly can't hurt.

Scenario:

example.com/red-shoes gets 301 redirected to example.com/brown-boots because we have stopped selling red shoes and now only sell brown boots (which is a fairly new page with no authority).

the red-shoes page ranked well for "red shoes" and "footwear".

Will Google still index and show the red-shoes url in the SERPs? Will the "red shoes" and "footwear" keywords still rank well? Or does the redirected/new boots page need to properly support these keywords? The boots page has inherited the juice from the shoes page, but how does it help the boots page rank well? Only for keywords that both pages targeted, like a general "footwear" type keyword?

Thanks in advance!