Sphinn - Mobile-Friendly Websites & The Duplicate Content Trap

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Mobile-Friendly Websites & The Duplicate Content Trap

Posted By: Silver 391 days ago
Topic Type: News Story (Jump to http://searchengineland.com)
Category: Mobile Search

Much like print-friendly versions of pages, mobile versions of pages can introduce duplication issues on sites, watering down their PageRank. This story describes a real-world case in point, and shows one solution to satisfy mobile distribution aims while supporting core site SEO.

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from SEOSleuth 391 days ago #

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Interesting solution to rid duplicate content and keep the muscle of the link popularity. An SEO double whammy! Kudos for the simple CSS solution.

from identity 391 days ago #

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Utilizing CSS makes management and marketing much easier too. No need to maintain a regular and mobile version of the same content, and no need to market two separate domains. This will certainly be an exciting medium to watch as it unfolds and becomes more mainstream.

from LongTail 390 days ago #

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Thanks for clarifying this issue for me.

from g1smd 390 days ago #

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I didn't understand how this bit works:

""The mobile CSS file reformats the content for better usability on a mobile device, and can strip out elements in the site that are too large or download-intensive for the average mobile device.""

OK. Yes, CSS can reformat the way the content is displayed; but I don't see how it can strip out things that are too large to download. They will still be downloaded to the device even if the mobile CSS indicates that the content doesn't need to be displayed, won't they?

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In any case, I still feel that a good solution is for the .mobi TLD to be implemented and all mobile content moved to that. To me, that would solve more problems than it would create. You can still use the same backend processes and scripts, but this time you don't need to rely on any sort of device detection. You merely need to capture the requested URL. If the .mobi URL was requested, you really can strip out, server-side, all HTML blocks that are not required. I would assume that search engines would be able to index both domains and only show the regular domain in the SERPs to regular web surfers, and only show the .mobi domain to mobile surfers in the mobile search results.

from Silver 388 days ago #

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At least according to the W3C Mobile Best Practices recommendation, one could use a mobile specific CSS, so larger images could be specified in the non-mobile CSS which would not be downloaded. Also, a number of sources recommend using style of display:none for larger images, although some are reporting that some handhelds will still download when display:none is used. The jury appears to be undecided in that issue, though.

I disagree about .mobi. I previously blogged about one or two things about .mobi rules that seemed really badly thought-out to me:

http://www.naturalsearchblog.com/archives/2006/06/20/mobi-top-level-domain-names-have-misguided-rules/

I've grown even more critical of the approach now, because the trend appears to be moving away from "special flavor" formats for mobile devices. Handhelds like the iPhone have made people desire even more to be able to view the same internet as what they find on their home PCs, and consumer demand for fast wireless data transfer has grown, too. Since terribly few websites support specialized mobile versions and since mobile devices are increasingly being built to automatically handle existing webpages to large degree, I think that going to the trouble of developing for .mobi is going to be a waste.

from g1smd 388 days ago #

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If not the TLD, then maybe a better way would be to have a quasi-standard where you put all mobile content on a mobi. subdomain - some way to intuitively figure out what sort of content you're going to get without actually fetching it.

from Silver 383 days ago #

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I think it's preferable to perform content negotiation where you sense the device type and deliver content accordingly.