People, AdMob just posted an article on their blog which has enough
importance and technical wisdom to be posted here:
http://admob.blogspot.com/2007/11/making-google-mobile-search-work-for.html
enjoy
Luca
========================
Making Google Mobile Search Work for Your Site
Google has made changes to their mobile search. Although many of the
improvements are laudable, it also has created some difficulities for
mobile specific sites. Users now see both mobile web and desktop web
results when searching using their mobile device, all within the same set
of search results. Google identifies sites it thinks are intended for
desktop viewing and sends those URLs through the Google Wireless
Transcoder (GWT) to transcode them for mobile, rather than linking
directly to the website. Examples of transcoded desktop sites can be seen
by searching in
http://www.google.com/m. The transcoded sites can be
identified by looking at the link URL, as they are prefixed with
http://www.google.com/gwt/n? .
This can result in these difficulties for mobile site owners:
- If your site has both a desktop representation and a mobile
representation, you would want Google to rank the mobile representation
higher than the transcoded desktop representation in mobile search
results. This is not always the case. Users may be directed to the
transcoded version of your desktop site, which may not provide the user
experience you intended.
- Sometimes Google will mistakenly think your mobile site is intended for
desktop use, and will send your mobile site through the GWT. Given that
your mobile site is already designed for mobile use, this may negatively
impact the user experience and potentially break functionality such as
targeting or billing using the phone's User-Agent or IP address.
Understandably, many in the mobile web community are concerned about the
impact of Google's practice of transcoding desktop sites*. Fortunately,
there is a simple fix to make Google mobile search work for you. I think
it is useful to share this with everyone who operates a mobile site. Here
is the recipe:
Put this tag in the <head> section of all the pages in your site, whether
intended for desktop use or mobile:
<link rel="alternate" type="text/html" media="handheld"
href="
http://example.mobi/" title="Mobile/PDA" />
replace
http://example.mobi/ with your page’s URL. When you have both a
desktop and mobile version of your site, using the mobile URL tells the
Google Wireless Transcoder to redirect the user to the mobile version.
Let me illustrate this with an example. Our site, TapTap , has implemented
the link tag. When you search for "TapTap" on
http://www.google.com/m ,
you will see several results. At the time of writing, the first result
goes to
http://taptap.net/ , the desktop web version of our home page,
sent through the GWT. By putting the link tag in our desktop page, we are
able to send users on the phone to our mobile version at
http://m.taptap.net/ , instead of having Google transcode our desktop
page, which are less useful for users on the phone.
Lower in the search results, you can see our mobile site. Unfortunately,
Google misidentifies our mobile site as being for desktop use and sends it
through the GWT
http://www.google.com/gwt/n?u=http%3A%2F%2Fm.taptap.net%2F
. By implementing the link tag in our mobile page at
http://m.taptap.net/
, we are able to tell the GWT not to transcode the page, sending users
directly to
http://m.taptap.net/ as desired.
Note that this may not alter the ranking of your site in Google's index.
This is simply a way to tell the GWT to send the user directly to your
mobile content, regardless of your ranking.
What to put in the href is also important. If possible, you should put the
URL of the mobile equivalent of the current page, or put the URL of the
current page if the page is designed for mobile. If you always put the
front page of your mobile site in the link tag, it may prevent users from
reaching their desired page directly from the Google search results.
We hope this is useful for you.
* Nadir Garouche from SEO Principle has a detailed blog post about
Google's decision here . Dennis from WAP Review has also chimed in . There
are some reports of difficulties in various mailing lists, such as this
one .
=========================
Luca
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