2 replies to this topic

[iamlost]

Just an heads up so you can consider possible ramifications...
Google has added a second mobile bot: Introducing smartphone Googlebot-Mobile, Google Webmaster Central Blog, 15-December-2011.

Here are the main user-agent strings that Googlebot-Mobile now uses:
* Feature phones Googlebot-Mobile:
---SAMSUNG-SGH-E250/1.0 Profile/MIDP-2.0 Configuration/CLDC-1.1 UP.Browser/6.2.3.3.c.1.101 (GUI) MMP/2.0 (compatible; Googlebot-Mobile/2.1;

---DoCoMo/2.0 N905i(c100;TB;W24H16) (compatible; Googlebot-Mobile/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)

* Smartphone Googlebot-Mobile:
---Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_1 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/532.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0.5 Mobile/8B117 Safari/6531.22.7 (compatible; Googlebot-Mobile/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)

The content crawled by smartphone Googlebot-Mobile will be used primarily to improve the user experience on mobile search.

If you serve mobile phone visitors a different from desktop content experience you may want to:
* consider which - or create a third variation - to offer smart phones.

* prominently display a 'switch/skip to' nav link for each site version served.
Note: depending on how your site is designed, configured, served the above may not be necessary. Except for consideration* below.

Also, if you are redirecting visitors to mobile based on user-agent you may want to watch to see how well Google does in connecting all the dots.

*It will also be interesting to see how Google handles the general index and the specifically mobile index when serving smartphone query results...

[bwelford]

Although aware of the distinction, I had never explored the differences you can get between regular search and mobile search.

I have now done a few parallel searches on my desktop using Firefox non-personalized search and my Android phone (Samson Galaxy). I was pleased to see that my blog posts rank even better in smartphone search than in regular search. All blogs use child versions of the latest WordPress default theme, twentyeleven. This degrades nicely in mobile devices so I presume it all counts as mobile content.

[glyn]

Google always defaults to mobile search - completely different results - to that of google search web, on my htc desire