Friday, November 13, 2009 at 1:48 PM
(This post was largely translated from our Japanese Webmaster Central Blog.)
It seems the world is going mobile, with many people using mobile phones on a daily basis, and a large user base searching on Google’s mobile search page. However, as a webmaster, running a mobile site and tapping into the mobile search audience isn't easy. Mobile sites not only use a different format from normal desktop site, but the management methods and expertise required are also quite different. This results in a variety of new challenges. As a mobile search engineer, it's clear to me that while many mobile sites were designed with mobile viewing in mind, they weren’t designed to be search friendly. I'd like to help ensure that your mobile site is also available for users of mobile search.
Here are troubleshooting tips to help ensure that your site is properly crawled and indexed:
Verify that your mobile site is indexed by Google
If your web site doesn't show up in the results of a Google mobile search even using the 'site:' operator, it may be that your site has one or both of the following issues:
Googlebot may not be able to find your site
Googlebot, our crawler, must crawl your site before it can be included in our search index. If you just created the site, we may not yet be aware of it. If that's the case, create a Mobile Sitemap and submit it to Google to inform us to the site’s existence. A Mobile Sitemap can be submitted using Google Webmaster Tools, in the same way as with a standard Sitemap.
Googlebot may not be able to access your site
Some mobile sites refuse access to anything but mobile phones, making it impossible for Googlebot to access the site, and therefore making the site unsearchable. Our crawler for mobile sites is "Googlebot-Mobile". If you'd like your site crawled, please allow any User-agent including "Googlebot-Mobile" to access your site. You should also be aware that Google may change its User-agent information at any time without notice, so it is not recommended that you check if the User-agent exactly matches "Googlebot-Mobile" (which is the string used at present). Instead, check whether the User-agent header contains the string "Googlebot-Mobile". You can also use DNS Lookups to verify Googlebot.
Verify that Google can recognize your mobile URLs
Once Googlebot-Mobile crawls your URLs, we then check for whether the URL is viewable on a mobile device. Pages we determine aren't viewable on a mobile phone won't be included in our mobile site index (although they may be included in the regular web index). This determination is based on a variety of factors, one of which is the "DTD (Doc Type Definition)" declaration. Check that your mobile-friendly URLs' DTD declaration is in an appropriate mobile format such as XHTML Mobile or Compact HTML. If it's in a compatible format, the page is eligible for the mobile search index. For more information, see the Mobile Webmaster Guidelines.
If you have any question regarding mobile site, post your question to our Webmaster Help Forum and webmasters around the world as well as we are happy to help you with your problem.
15 comments:
Nice post about ; But Meta tags will be different for mobile crawlers or same as usual.
Very helpful for webmasters.
Excellent article. I followed the recommendations and got my mobile site listed in Google Mobile.
http://aseanmobile.mobi/
I find this to be very informative for consumers depending on web site optimazation.
-David Lee
Partner Sales and Marketing
Business Advancement Services BAS, LLC
www.basexperts.com
if we need a sitemap index file (more than 50,000 URL) what will be content of index file for mobile , same ? please give an example ...
To optimizer a site mobile you can use the same meta tag and Tag that you use for web site. Google.site is an example of site optimized for mobile.
well sir
I have a website but i donot
want to submit it right now to
google.
However can i just verify if i have not made any mistake which may
prevent bots from crawling into my
site without submitting it to google......
BINNOY
can i not submit my website
but only verify with google whether
i havent made any mistake which in
turn is preventing bots from entering my website
BINNOY
hi there,
the link to mobile webmaster help is broken:
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=40348
Actually this page 40348 is referred to a lot in the forums and help sections....
where has the content been moved?
Been working on mobile and web version of sites for quite a while and I think Google's still a little confusing on this.
The problem is that 'regular' sites can easily show up in the mobile search so it's difficult to force the mobile area to _only_ show mobile.
We've ended up with robots.txt blocking mobile bot on main icklepedia site and regular bot on mobile icklepedia site - as well as putting noindex to the google bot on the mobile site.
Regular pages still seem to end up on the mobile search and we really don't want duplicates. Quite frustrating !
Any known duplicate content or other SEO related issues from site utilizing www.dudamobile.com?
In the video "Does indexing a mobile website create a duplicate..." You mentioned to use m.yoursite.com.
My questions are
1. what is the point of .mobi extensions if they are not to be used?
2.Do you or don't you give extra credit for the .mobi extension?
hello,Im newbie blogger,
I have too many duplicate content after I add code from dudamobile,
after that my blog deindex from search result, very nice..huh (crying)
Hi everyone,
Since over a year has passed since we published this post, we're closing the comments to help us focus on the work ahead. If you still have a question or comment you'd like to discuss, free to visit and/or post your topic in our Webmaster Central Help Forum.
Thanks and take care,
The Webmaster Central Team
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