Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock, you’re bound to have noticed the furore surrounding the release of Apple’s new iPhone 4S and accompanying ios5 software update recently. Perhaps you’ve been stung by the laborious update process yourself? Maybe that moment of horror when your iPhone is wiped before it’s restored has become all too familiar? If so, you’ll agree that mobile websites are the future and look set to run alongside desktop sites in the web design market for as long as the smartphone reigns. We’ve already covered canonicalization and htaccess files extensively, yet because they’re so important for safeguarding the authority of your main domain I thought the subject was worth revisiting here. If you do have a smartphone, you’ll notice that very often when trying to access a website you’ll be redirected to a mobile friendly URL of that site. Take Facebook for example. Punching www. facebook. com into my iPhone only takes me to m.facebook.com, and frustratingly it appears that I have to login and access the dropdown menu to be taken back to the desktop site. If you’re building your own site then, this is one option. However, if you do opt for an m.domain.com URL, the first thing to be aware of is that you could be annoying users with redirected URLs (although this may be unavoidable). But more importantly of course, are you annoying googlebot and damaging your SEO campaign by having multiple URLs? Google oglašavanje have stated that they have a separate bot for the latter content (WAP etc), while smartphone mobile websites are crawled as normal by the regular, plain old Googlebot. Why? Because, say Google, smartphone content is usually the same as desktop content, with only minor changes to accommodate display on a smaller screen. Let’s leave WAP content then, and focus on mobile sites (for smartphones).
For webmasters, the fact that the regular bot covers mobile content is actually a good thing, as it means that you don’t have do anything to ensure your mobile sites appear in normal search results – with good traditional optimisation techniques this will happen naturally. Desktop users will view mobile content in much the same way as the mobile users will see it. Well, potentially this is an issue. One option that you have is to disable the m.domain.com URL using your robots.txt file, although this could lead to mobile searchers being unable to find your site in search, or at least unable to find the mobile version. In what is perhaps the preferable solution, Google has stated that you can use the “rel=canonical” tag to make sure that Google focuses on the desktop version of the site. This would theoretically stop them from displaying your mobile content to desktop users in search results, and also from indexing multiple URLs of the same page of your site. What you’d then have to do is redirect mobile users only to the m.domain.com version of the site, which would display a separate, mobile friendly version of the site. The final option available to us is to use a separate stylesheet for mobile browsers of our site. This would enable us to effectively change what the user sees, dependent upon what browser or OS they were using to view our site. Now the real techies out there (of which group I am by no means a part), will have spotted that this method could be penalised by Google as ‘cloaking’, and theoretically you’re right. Cloaking is where a website displays a different page to Googlebot compared to the one which users see, and it’s heavily penalised by the omnipotent search engine. Thankfully, Google have categorically stated that the above method will not be viewed as cloaking. The choice then, remains your own. There are pitfalls with either technique, but both offer a workaround which works, at least in terms of SEO.
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