Advanced Mobile SEO Best Practices

The differences between mobile and traditional SEO strategies and tactics all stem from the fact that different crawlers are indexing and evaluating your website as is it was being displayed on a mobile phone. It is essentially the same model, with slightly different parts and different algorithms determining how the website will be ranked. That being said, some more advanced SEO strategies are specific to mobile search engine optimization.

Search engines index the Web page by page, but they also evaluate the power and historical value of a domain name or website as a whole. A domain name that has been around for a long time, ranks well, and gets consistent traffic is considered more valuable than a new domain that has little history, few rankings, or little traffic. Each page on a website is judged independently, but pages on a more established domain will generally perform better than the same page on a less established domain.

Because the search engines index the Web based on individual pages or URLs, you must have only one URL for each unique page on the website. Some websites get into trouble when multiple versions of one page are indexed in the search engines, either because the servers are set up incorrectly or because multiple URLs are being dynamically generated and used to represent just one page.

Having multiple indexable URLs that represent only one page of content is a problem we call duplicate content, or DUST ( which stands for duplicate URL, same text). This is a problem for traditional and mobile search engines because it crowds their indexes. Generally, the search engines will pick up only one of the duplicate results to rank in search results. The best practice is to ensure a 1:1 ratio between the number of URLs that will resolve in a browser and the number of pages you would like to rank in search results.

In some instances, server settings or ModRewrite programs can be used to eliminate extra versions of a page that renders in a browser address bar. A good example is htt://mysite.com and http://www.mysite.com. These addresses both bring up the same page, but could confuse the search engines, because one page has two addresses. In this situation, you would want to see which of the addresses ranks better in search engines, and redirect or automatically re-write the other one to appear as the primary or "canonical" one.

Alternately, a canonical meta tag can be included on the secondary page, indicating the primary or canonical page there. That tag looks like this: and it explains that, in this case, the primary or canonical version of the page is the one with the 'www', and this tag would be placed on the page that doesn't have the 'www' included in the URL.

In the mobile world, things can get more complex, because some websites may have one page for the traditional rendering of the website, and another page for the mobile rendering of the website. They may even have one version of the traditional rendering of the website, and multiple versions of the mobile rendering of the website. In that case, you may need to use a mobile robots.txt, to explain to the search engine robots which content they should be crawling and indexing.

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