Cindy Krum, CEO MobileMoxie (@suzzicks)
Mobile Marketing: Finding Your Customers Wherever They Are
1. Separate MObile Pages
– Mobile speficic design templates and content
– user agent detection, redirect from desktop to mobile
2. Responsive Design
– dual purpose pages for desktop and mobile
– same URLs for both versions
3. Mixed Solution (RESS)
Case Study: Info-tainment
DUST – duplicate URL same text
Mobilization Engine was creating lots of DUST
Kills the efficiency of the crawl
Since not all pages were mobilized, not all pages were redirected to a mobile version
– desktop pages still ranked in mobile search
Mobilization engine not caching and compressing pages correctly
– update feeds sent to the mobile engine to include SEO tags
– better server rules to reduce DUST
– Canonical tags up to the desktop URLs
Case Study: Doctor Directory
Mobile CMS driven templates in limited beta; wanted responsive design
Had launched hand-templated ‘m’ site but not happy with it
Beta mobile site does not contain directory pages
– concerned that deep pages would not get crawled or indexed very well
Current desktop pages too big to use responsive design effectively
– how many roundtrip DNS requests have to be made?
Move forward with current m. beta launch
– rely on UA detection and redirection from desktop to mobile
– test success and track performance
– New smartphone bot will get around the need for directory pages (eventually)
Smartphone bot relies on desktop rankings
Start a resp design with serverside components
Case Study: e-commerce site
Improve mobile rankings to drive more mobile shopping and sales
Desktop content ranking really well in mobile search
Wap & smartphone sites
Clean, light mobile pages with mostly good redirects
Inconsistencies between robots.txt, canonical tags, and XML sitemaps
Javascript Error message was the first thing indexed and cached – became a description tag in SERPS
Misdirection – desktop pages ranking well & redirecting to blank error pages
Only 6 pieces of unique anchor text on the entire site
Almost all links on the site (internal links) have no anchor text
Fix parsing error in redirection rules
STOP JS ERROR indexing by adding bot specific instructions
Changing linking on DIVs to linking on images and anchor text
Hard to get lots of ecommerce rankings on one search
– pushing Universal Search Results & App Results in Google to own more of the mobile SERP page
Improve social interactivity on the mobile content
– better profile page rankings for the brand
– good for future of mobile search
MobileMoxie tools: SMXA2012
Bryson Meunier (@BrysonMeunier)
Mobile search will surpass desktop search in a matter of years…not decades
Many paths to mobile SEO
Desktop vs Mobile
Responsive Design
Smartphone, Tablet optimized
Site that works well on all devices
Disagreements within Google
Matt Cutts said mobile sites don’t cause canonicalization issues
Google Webmaster Team selected Responsive design for maintainability
Different search behavior requires different content to achieve user goals
Case study: Arby’s
Some categories need dedicated mobile sites
What content appears in smartphone search results?
Tested code validation, mobile usability and pagespeed and 37 total factors
Validation is key? Only 1 site validated, so it’s not true that you need to be validated.
Mobile usability/page speed is helpful? — 65% of sites in sample actually failed W3C’s Mobile OK test
72% got a score of bad (ready.mobi)
Linkbuilding is unnecessary? — Linkbuilding is necessary even though it is mobile
dotmobi helps? — not true. Distribution of TLDs resemble desktop distribution of TLDs.
Mobile sites help ranking? — 64% of sites in the site had mobile content…a mobile site or responsive design or both.
How do top sites approach mobile SEO? Top 100 SEMrush sites response to smartphone googlebot crawl”
– 83% redirect or reformat
– 10% not crawled
– 7% no response
What they do?
– 60% redirect to mobile URL
71% of top 100 SEMrush sites have a mobile URL, 10% have no mobile site
Data-driven mobile seo best practices
1. understand differences between what mobile user wants vs desktop user wants
2. build a mobile homepage at m.domain.com OR build a mobile first responsive design driven site if goals are same
3. Don’t block mobile URLs with robots.txt. Use canonical tags for duplicate URLs and redirect smartphone URLs to smartphone Googlebot but make mobile homepage unique to appear for mobile navigational searches
Next Up: Pierre Far from Google (@pierrefar), webmaster trends analyst
Smartphone sites and Google search
Recommendations for building smartphone-optimized sites
First choice: mobile site on same URLs or on different URLs
Are you going to serve same HTML or different HTML?
Responsive web design
Dynamic serving
Responsive web design
Same HTML
+ Same URL
++ CSS Media Queries
With responsive web design, there is an efficiency win because we don’t have to crawl your site with all of our different crawlers.
Please let all Googlebots to access all your HTML
Responsive web design tips
– Max width 640px
– Allow all bots
Dynamic serving
Different HTML
+ Same URL
Separate mobile site
Different HTML
+ Different URL
We need you to annotate these pages (relationship annotation)
rel-canonical from m.domain to www.domain
on www.domain.com rel-alternate
It’s a URL-level annotation
1. rel=”alternate” in sitemaps
2. Vary HTTp header if you automatically redirect (this is another signal to Google)
3. If not, understand trade-offs and pitfalls, and implement correctly (if you can’t get it right, use responsive website design instead)
Q&A
Pierre says ranking factors are same on mobile for desktop. I’m not going to say anything definitive because I know you guys will break it.