Mobile Site SEO - Playing Nicely with Google

Question

If I have an iPhone version of my site, what are the things I need to make sure of so it doesn't interfere with SEO?

I've read quite a bit now about cloaking and sneaky javascript redirects, and am wondering how this fits into iPhone and Desktop websites playing together.

If my iPhone site has a totally different layout, where say the Desktop site has a page with 3 posts and 10 images all on the page, and my iPhone site makes that 2 pages, one with the posts, one with the images (trying to think up an example where the structure's decently different), that's probably not best practice for SEO, so should I just tell google not to look at the mobile site? If so, and assuming my client would like to automatically redirect mobile users to the iPhone site (I'm familiar with the id of taking them to the regular page with a link to the mobile version instead), how do I not make this look like cloaking?

Answer 1

Certainly you have the option of telling the search engines to not look at the mobile page. I would leave it though because you never know who is looking for something specific and maybe Google will prefer certain pages over others for mobi users.

If the 2 pages on mobi make sense to the visitor then I would not worry about it for SEO. If you are redirecting based on mobi then I don't see how the search engines could think you are cloaking, but if you want to be totally sure I suggest using CSS to show different information based on Media type.

The only problem I can think of would be of duplicate content. The SEs may see both pages and not rank one as highly because it likes what it sees on the other page. There is no penalty other than the fact that one page is more interesting than the other and may get better rankings whereas the other drops in rank. If you are making two separate pages it would be an opportunity to tune your information to specific details and maybe get hits for both, but if you are using CSS then it will rank as one page.

Answer 2

Google actually has a separate index and crawler for mobile content. So all you need to do is design your URLs in such a way that you can exclude googlebot from the mobile pages and googlebot-mobile from the regular pages in robots.txt.