Duplicate content issues on mobile sites

Posted by mattsclarke 6 weeks ago

Joined: 1 year ago

Posts: 9

[offline]

I'm just wondering whether anyone can provide some expert input on the potential problem of duplicate content issues on mobile websites, please?

I'm currently adding dotMobi compliant mobile functionality to my CMS platform, but am concerned about the risks of the mobile versions of pages being viewed as duplicates of the fixed-line version, resulting in poorer search engine rankings.

At present, my mobile site resides in a directory called /mobile/ (though there's an option to host it on a .mobi domain with the same prefix as the parent site). So I could use robots.txt to inform spiders/bots not to index this section. I could also add noindex tags to the mobile pages, but then the pages wouldn't appear in mobile search engines.

Does anyone know of a solution to this? Assuming it is a real world problem, and not just a theoretical one. I mean, I presume that Google is wise enough to realise that content providers adapt content for mobiles.

Many thanks,
Matt

Posted by atrasatti 6 weeks ago

Joined:
2 years ago

Posts:
235

[offline]

Search engines should be smart enough know that and also be able to act properly if my site has device detection and provides different content for mobile devices and desktops. This is, although, something that is evolving every single day and search engines are catching up, in this case.

The safest approach would be to provide desktop-only on, say .com (or whatever regional TLD you want to use) and mobile content on .mobi.

I think it'll just work fine anyway as long as you don't try to fool the search engines. You might notice, once you go live with mobile content, that search engines also use mobile-specific user-agent strings to crawl your sites.

Another good idea is probably to provide a mobile-specific sitemap as recommended by Google and the others who joined and support the specifications.

Andrea Trasatti
DeviceAtlas, mobile device intelligence