Desktop vs. Mobile SEO

[Uctqnde]

Hi Everyone,

I didn't see a mobile specific forum, so I am posting this question here (hope it's in the right spot).

I am currently working on the optimization of my website's mobile site. Some of the content is brand-new (tailored to the mobile audience) and some of the content is taken directly from the site. Since it's an m. site - I am canonicaling the duplicate content, but my question is this:

Should the duped content on the mobile site have different or the same on-page info (i.e. title tag, description, etc)?

My feeling is that they should be different, but at the same time it will be canonicaled, so I am not 100%. I am still feeling my way around the mobile vs. desktop issues.

Any insight would be really helpful!

Thanks!

[tedster]

I'm not exactly an expert in hands-on SEO for mobile, but I have taken in several conference presentations about it as well as background reading... enough to know that these are pretty deep waters.

My first instinct is that you are right - the titles and descriptions should be different most of the time. For mobile, you want the titles to be very concise. I think Google is going to mess with your descriptions a lot more on mobile than desktop search, but it can't hurt to give it a shot.

At least descriptions are not a direct ranking factor, but only a possible click-through factor. The titles, however, are a direct ranking/relevance factor.

[Uctqnde]

Thanks for replying tester - I am in the same position in terms of the SEO for mobile.

There will be a lot of trial and error :)

Thanks again!

[Uctqnde]

@ tedster, sorry for the typo in your name. Wouldn't let me edit!

Thanks!

[Aubiejon]

So the thought is to use unique Titles for the mobile content? Is this in order to make it fit a mobile window of is this to avoid being the same as the desktop version?

I'm a little lost on this topic to be honest...

We have made one of our sites share the same url.. so it gives the user the smaller/mobile version of our site.

1) What are your thoughts on the xml sitemap for this type of site?

2) Do you think it's important to actually change the Doc type on the mobile pages?

I see that Google use to consider Mobile sites those targeted to the older devices but recently they say they are having Googlebot- mobile look for stuff as a smart phone (http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/12/introducing-smartphone-googlebot-mobile.html).

How do you guys handle all this?

A little sanity to my life please :)

[netmeg]

I'm using the same URL (responsive design) for my assorted mobile sites; we're removing some of the content to better suit mobile intent, but I'm not messing with a different sitemap or anything like that.

Last year I used a mobile plugin (these are WordPress sites) on the same URL, and that worked out quite well, didn't appear to have any problems whatsoever.

In both cases, I'm detecting user agents to determine what to serve.