Same content on a .mobi and a .com

[fixxation]

Hi

I'm trying to figure out if search engines would look at what I'm trying to accomplish as a bad thing.

Basically we have two sites, a .com and a .mobi - both with the exact same content, however the .mobi version is a trimmed-down version of the .com - it has none of the cool Javascript bits and hardly any images. However, the main (text) content of pages with the exact same URL (different domain, of course) is the exact same content, it's just that the layout is different, as the .mobi version is targeted at mobile phone users.

Do you think Google/Yahoo would penalize us for doing this? I know it's the same content, but it really needs to be done this way- the whole point of the .mobi of our .com is to have a mirrored copy for mobile phones. The keywords, URLs, title tags etc are exactly the same.

Has anyone had an experience with this, and noticed any negative impact from the search engine end?

Thanks,
A.

 

[-REECE-]

We were having that very discussion with Sean Rowen, a Google engineer yesterday.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Scandiman
Thanks again for the input and I totally agree that intentional content bloating is a bad practice. But w/ mobile design I find myself wanting to trim down reasonable PC content for the sake of screen size but the content starts to loose keyword meaning. Say for example I was developing parts.mobi and on the first page I had links to different brands. Normally I would build my links "Honda parts", "Toyota parts" etc to help reinforce the keywords together. But for a mobile site I may want to only list Honda, Toyota etc just to keep it lightweight. So in the interest of cleaner design I've lost the keyword pairing. Similarly my part descriptions will be very concise for the sake of the presentation medium and I'll loose keywords there as well. I'm just curious if you all are trying to accommodate this problem in your algorithms.

In regards to the hyperlinks, how would you characterize a good one vs a bad one?

Also, what method would you recommend to have the crawler see one site version and avoid another. I'll be using WURFL to direct the users to the appropriate version. You're correct, the versions will be substantially the same. But in the future there may develop some larger differences as some phone models continue to advance beyond todays offerings. The device diversity creates the need. Also, if I offer a full fledged PC site version then there may be considerably more content there vs. the mobile site. If the PC site were crawled, would this be a case of cloaking in that the mobile users don't see all the content that is being indexed by google?

Quote:
Originally posted by srowen:
You have a good point. I still don't think you should try to design for search engines. For example the "Toyota parts" page presumably has those keywords together even if the link doesn't. I don't think one has to be so spartan on mobile pages that it becomes a problem for information retrieval algorithms; if it did it would probably be a problem for users too.

Good hyperlinks -- I just mean it's in your interest to make it easy for users, and thus crawlers to find your whole site, which probably means everything's linked in some way and that links are labeled constructively and all that. But of course sitemaps also helps discovery.

The mobile crawl User-Agent header always contains "Googlebot-Mobile" so you can look for that if you like. The rest resembles the User-Agent for some common phone, a Nokia I believe, so those using string-matching approaches should correctly serve mobile content. WURFL no doubt has an entry for Googlebot. It doesn't really matter which mobile version you send back; I'd just avoid sending back anything that looks like it's exclusively for high-end phones (e.g. really large markup) since it might be deemed not mobile. I wouldn't worry about cloaking. It's well known that one URL may return different content to the mobile crawl signature.
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Hope that helps!

 

[fixxation]

Nice one, thanks for that Reece- that'll definitely help out.

Cheers
A.