5 replies to this topic

[mraccine]

Hi All,

My mobile phone version of my regular site resides in its own folder - URL/mobile. I use [a] redirect script to detect phone users and send them to the mobile version.

My question is, should I put NOINDEX on the mobile version so it doesn't appear in Google's results?

My worry is that desktop users may visit the mobile version of the site if they see the indexed pages in the search results.

[Jill]

I'm not positive about this, but since Google is not a mobile device, it shouldn't index the mobile version.

Do you also have a script on the mobile version that would detect if a desktop browser came to it, they would end up at the desktop version?

I think that would better solve your problem. Because you do want the mobile version to be indexed in mobile search.

[mraccine]

I'm not positive about this, but since Google is not a mobile device, it shouldn't index the mobile version.

Do you also have a script on the mobile version that would detect if a desktop browser came to it, they would end up at the desktop version?

I think that would better solve your problem. Because you do want the mobile version to be indexed in mobile search.

Hi Jill,

Google did index the mobile pages. I used the site:mydomain.com to make sure from a desktop computer.

Not sure if I want to add a redirect from mobile to desktop. One bad programming error and I can see users being directed back in forth with no end in site. I'm sure that the redirect code doesn't identify all devices 100% accurately either.

I guess I assumed that mobile search was nearly the same as a desktop search. Am I wrong? I do know that I can choose which devices that my Google Adwords campaign will appear on. Other than that, I thought they were identical.

[qwerty]

I'm still learning about this myself, but as I understand it, the script that you use to detect mobile users should be looking for particular user-agents, including Googlebot-Mobile.

See Making Websites Mobile Friendly

[chrishirst]

Just use relative units in CSS/HTML to create your document and they will automatically "mobile friendly".

No scripts, no redirects and no duplicate sites needed.

[qwerty]

I think that's the right strategy for a lot of sites, but I don't think it would work for us. Our pages are so big (something I'm hoping to fix, but it's a long, slow process) that even if we set the CSS for the mobile display of the page to not display a lot of elements, it would still take forever for the page to load. I think we have to create separate, stripped-down versions of our pages for a separate mobile site and redirect to it based on recognized user-agents.