Mobile Redirect Header Response and SEO

[Dasegad]

Hi All,

I have a question on how Google treats the header responses (ie. 301, 302, 500, 200, 404, etc).

What is Google's preferred header response when you have an auto-detect and redirect to a mobile version of a site if a user accesses from a phone? Is it a 301? A 200 ok?

I've been looking everywhere for an answer to this but haven't been able to find any information,

Thanks!

[Robert Charlton]

Doing a site search for [mobile redirects] on webmasterworld.com should bring up a lot of references. The area is evolving as new devices become prominent in the marketplace.

We had a discussion here in February....

Best type of redirect to use, from desktop to mobile site?
Feb 16, 2011
http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4291642.htm [webmasterworld.com]

Google's blog published something while our discussion was in progress...

Making Websites Mobile Friendly
Official Google Webmaster Central Blog
Tuesday, February 22, 2011
[googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com...]

More recently, John Mueller of Google had a Q&A session available on Google+ and introduces some new information....

John Mueller Q&A: Mobile Websites & Google's crawling, indexing and ranking -- the Q&A buzz!
June 3, 2011
[plus.google.com...] [plus.google.com...]

This comment addresses one of your questions specifically...

...in practice, if you are redirecting Googlebot Mobile from the desktop to the traditional mobile pages, you can use either a 301 or 302 redirect. Both are ok, we do not have a preference there any more.

A lot will depend on how many different versions of the site you have.

The most exciting approach I've seen so far involves dynamic resizing of a single site... discussed in our Supporters area in this thread... [webmasterworld.com...] ...but available to paid WebmasterWorld Supporters only.