Google’s blog hints at mobile SEO tips

Light has been shed on the closer mechanics of mobile SEO after Google recently issued a blog piece about how mobile websites can best interact with search engine crawlers.

One of the main disclosures in the entry – posted by Google’s webmaster trends analyst, Pierre Far – was that the search engine crawler used by Google, Googlebot, is the same for desktop sites as for smartphone sites, since the latter now have browsers that “rival the full desktop experience”.

“For now, we expect smartphones to handle desktop experience content so there is no real need for mobile-specific effort from webmasters. However, for many websites it may still make sense for the content to be formatted differently for smartphones…based on how you can best serve your users,” said Far.

Another crawler, Googlebot-Mobile, serves content for only ‘traditional’ mobile phones, or those that cannot render normal desktop pages, such as browsers for WAP.

For websites with dedicated mobile content, the URL structure is different to sites with only desktop experience content. Such a situation was perceived to be a missed SEO opportunity, but the Google post stressed that “it does not matter what the URL structure is as long as it returns exactly what a user sees too.”

Furthermore, using the same URL for both desktop-like browsers and mobile content is not seen as ‘cloaking’ – or the practice of presenting different URLs to users and search engines in an attempt to be deceptive – by Google.