Mobile SEO: Managing Googlebot & Your Mobile Sites
In December 2011 Google announced that it now has a smartphone Googlebot-Mobile. Historically, Googlebot-Mobile has concerned itself only with mobile sites designed for feature phones, so this is a pretty significant development. Today's column is going to discuss how to think about Googlebot, Googlebot-Mobile and your mobile web site.
As noted in this recent mobile SEO podcast with Cindy Krum one of the first decisions you need to make is what types of devices youre targeting. If you dont have many feature phone users who are trying to access your site, you may not need to support them, and you can focus your mobile phone site on smartphone devices.
This impacts how you set up your site. Mobile sites that dont support feature phones should use a same URL strategy - i.e. one where the mobile content renders on the exact same URL as the desktop content, and smartphone users are served the mobile version of the site using user agent detection (we call this the "Same URL" strategy). The reason you would prefer this is that your mobile site will then inherit all the SEO benefits of your desktop site (i.e. the link profile and other measures of content value and importance).
If you do support feature phones the problem becomes more complex. The technical challenges in supporting a wide array of form factors / screen sizes might make it easier from a technology standpoint to build your mobile site using a m.yourdomain.com approach. You lose the SEO goodness of the desktop site, but you can still send users to it using user agent detection.
Once you have decided on an approach, you also need to set up your user agent detection. This is the process by which you recognize incoming user agents. When you see an incoming user agent that is mobile device specific, send them to the mobile version of your site. Make sure that your user agent detection includes Googlebot-Mobile. Google just introduced a new version specific to mobile sites designed for smartphones. The current user agent strings used by Googlebot-Mobile are:
I asked Google for clarification on how they recommend the user agent detection for their crawler should be implemented. A Google spokesperson told me:
"There are two parts to this: The user agents of Googlebot-Mobile contain device names that represent certain classes of mobiles. We have two for feature phones and one for smartphone. They're all listed in the blog post you referenced.
Conceptually, our recommendation is this: Take the user agent Googlebot-Mobile has specified, remove (or ignore) the Googlebot identifying part. This leaves a device name representing a class of devices and websites should serve the best content they have for that class of device. For example, when you do this using the user agent of Googlebot-Mobile for smartphones, this kind of check will reveal an iPhone user agent and you should serve the content you have optimized for iPhones.
The corollary consideration is when the site does not have optimized content. In this case a website should serve what they would serve anyone by default. Usually that turns out to be the desktop content.