By Igor Faletski Add comments

Mobile SEO = NoIndex

Sep 072009

A couple of months ago we blogged about the pros and cons of Mobile SEO, covering the subject of several listings per domain, different content available on mobile / desktop versions of the site and so on. In the couple of months that followed, we continued our trials & discussions with the biggest sites powered by Mobify. In the end, we arrived to a surprising conclusion – the best mobile SEO strategy today is the “noindex” directive for the mobile view coupled with 1:1 URL mapping from desktop to mobile and device detection. Here’s why:

1) Mobile views appear in desktop search results (which is probably a shortcoming of search engines, as well) pulling a share of traffic meant for desktop. In some cases, this traffic reaches 30% of the overall mobile view.

2) Thanks to device detection, mobile users hitting desktop links will always get the optimized, mobile experience.

3) With netbooks and other devices sitting in between desktop and mobile form factors, the line between various views of the same content is blurred. It is important for the content source to adapt automatically, without requiring a new SEO strategy.

To reflect this, all Mobify-powered mobile views will soon have “noindex” on by default, relying on search engine rankings of the full site and automatic device detection.

  • http://tripleodeon.com James Pearce

    Well, this could make or break you.

    I think it’s too early to call how SEO works, and how the incredibly embryonic science of mobile search will evolve.

    The better you are at device detection, the better, of course. But I don’t know… how good are you at being sure you know which site’s services the human actually wants? How good is even the best mobile search engine?

    And if you’re serving the same services to both mobile and sedentary users, it will only be by chance that you thrill both. (But then that’s a pseudo-constraint of transcoding.)

    On the other hand, you should have plenty of data to use to correlate the results – and if it works… well, go for it ;-)

  • http://www.phonenews.com/ Christopher Price

    As Matt Cutts put it best, the search engines understand that some duplicate content will happen. It’s part of life on the web. They take that into account in their heuristics.

    I think it’s a big mistake to assume that mobile SEO should bear noindex for two key reasons:

    1) If an engine keeps a unified database of noindex for mobile and desktop view, you could wind up blacklisting your entire site on both.

    2) If the databases are separate, you now don’t exist on the mobile side at all. Any mobile browser (using xHTML-Mobile or earlier) won’t see you.

    Darned if you do, darned if you don’t. Seems MOBIFY has made their decision, I can’t encourage anyone to try it.

  • http://www.mobify.me Igor Faletski

    We’ll let you know how it goes James =)

  • http://www.mobify.me Igor Faletski

    Christopher, excellent points. We will have to evaluate the results of this move in a few months’ time based on traffic distribution. If you have any data on this, it would be highly appreciated!

  • htda.net

    sites are still getting indexed in google and other search engines,, how to manually add no index to mobify site