

Pros and Cons of Mobile SEO - ig0rskee
http://blog.mobify.me/2009/07/14/pros-and-cons-of-mobile-seo/

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onreact-com
You are doing mobile SEO the wrong way. The industry best practice is to use
one page with different stylesheets. Not a separate page, site or subdomain
like Digg does.

You might want to check out a list of mobile SEO resources I compiled last
week for a start:

[http://www.seoptimise.com/blog/2009/07/33-mobile-seo-
mobile-...](http://www.seoptimise.com/blog/2009/07/33-mobile-seo-mobile-
analytics-resources.html)

[Edit:] Also "blocking search engine crawlers from seeing the mobile view"
will result in your mobile pages removed completely, from the mobile index as
well.

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karanbhangui
While the CSS spec was designed to keep in mind various media types, the
industry standard is indeed a 'm' subdomain for the mobile version of the
site. I think this need has arisen because the use of HTML/CSS has gone well
beyond minimalist content markup of documents, to full blown GUI websites
(i.e. sites with complex navigation bars), which doesn't exactly transfer well
onto mobile. I think this is why only the simplest of sites (i.e. blogs, text
search engine results) will be able to display an alternate stylesheet for
acceptable mobile presentation.

More complex sites would need a more tuned site (i.e. m.wikipedia.org - notice
how the edit stuff is cut out for example)

ps- i hope i've understood your contention correctly :D

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onreact-com
OK, it obviously depends on which industry we actually speak of. The overall
Web industry tends to do it wrong like in the example above. Creating two
sites for the same content is fundamentally flawed.

From a SEO perspective we always try to avoid duplicate content issues and
splitting up of your site authority. I'd recommend the current issue of the
Search Marketing Standard Magazine (disclosure: I'm an affiliate of it) which
features an interview with mobile SEO Cindy Krum. She explains the issue with
separate sites/pages quite well.

On the other hand I have witnessed the negative impact of such subdomain based
mobile SEO already years ago. It never quite worked with Google.

~~~
ig0rskee
Well, it's pretty much a standard:

cnn.com & m.cnn.com

facebook.com & m.facebook.com

gmail.com & m.gmail.com

So definitely disagree with the notion of "fundamentally flawed" as literally
every significant site is doing it at this point

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onreact-com
Yeah, but do we need Gmail or Facebook crawled? No, both are private. They
don't get indexed at all.

The CNN site is quite messed up. Check this:

"2 U.S. Marines killed in Afghanistan" site:cnn.com

You have duplicate content twice + the mobile version does not even contain
the article when you click on the search snippet.

