Mobile version of existing site

Mobile version of existing site, duplicate content?

[mhodgdon]

We recently built a version of one of our more popular forums into a .mobi site for mobile users to take advantage of post information on the go.

Question: Is a syndicated version of a .com forum that is reformatted for a mobile format (.mobi extension) considered duplicate content to the search engines.

We would like to provide mobile users access to this content but not at the expense of our .com sites search placement and I can't seem to find any definitive answers anywhere as to whether this is a problem?

[bill]

A domain extension alone certainly won't affect any search engine's spiders and algorithm from doing their job. One idea would be to use a robots.txt file to block out the search engine's crawlers and only allow in those you want.

[mhodgdon]

Do you think thee search engines woould co9nsider it duplicate content?

We do want it spidered if it won't create problems.

Is the different format and extension enough of a difference?

[mhodgdon]

For clarification (I hope I'm not breaking any rules of this forum) I have listed the sites below. I didn't intend on posting the links but I have asked this on a couple other threads and haven't really recieved an answer. It may be just because I didn't explain it well, the recent duplicate content issue has created so many questions, or because the format is so new, but I figured the more specific I am the better likelihood I have of getting answers.

If I am not suppose to post web addresses, my apologies.

The site we are syndicating the content from is [url]http://www.example.com[/url] more specifically [url]http://www.example.com/forum/[/url] the site we are providing the content in a mobile format is [url]http://www.example.mobi[/url]

The purpose of syndicating these forums on a cell is so that < visitors > can access < information> from their mobile phones, while they are < on location >.

P.S. I saw and tried to respond to a thread about questions regarding "what the dotMobi specifications are" that apparently had been closed. We used the following resources to ensure the site was compliant. We found them very helpful:

Mobile Compliance reporting (this report is very specific about compliance and in our first attempt we were not compliant)
[mr.dev.mobi ]

Emulator to view your mobi site in a phone format
[emulator.mtld.mobi ]

Development Specs
[pc.mtld.mobi ]

I did not personally biuld the .mobi site so I probably can not answer on much more then the info above, but if you specific development questions in regards to the mobi site I will pass them along to the developer and see if I can get an answer for you.

No links Insert

<Sorry, no personal URLs.
See Terms of Service [webmasterworld.com]>

[edited by: tedster at 7:39 am (utc) on Dec. 22, 2006]

[mhodgdon]

A domain extension alone certainly won't affect any search engine's spiders and algorithm from doing their job. One idea would be to use a robots.txt file to block out the search engine's crawlers and only allow in those you want.

Thank you for the reply Bill, It finally sunk in. Are you suggesting we identify mobile search engines and define them on the robots.txt file and exclude all regular web crawlers? If so, do you have any idea how we identify the mobile crawlers?

Do you think or have you heard if the mobi formatting and extension difference merit a wide enough gap in duplicate content because it would seem to me that many mobi users are in fact using the .mobi site to offer existing web content to mobile users?

[bill]

The folks at Google put up a nice post explaining how you can deal with duplicate content proactively: Deftly dealing with duplicate content [googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com]
They suggest using robots.txt as well... ;)

[madmatt69]

This is a great topic, I was about to ask the same.

One concern is that I noticed in google sitemaps that they allow for Mobile Sitemaps. I haven't looked too closely at it, but I'm wondering is there a seperate bot that google uses to identify mobile pages?

I also have a mobile version of my site and want to rank in search engines for it when people are searching on their phones, pda's whatever, but want to avoid dup content penalties.

[dibbern2]

This discussion appears to be about posting duplicate content -i.e., the same web site in a mobi and non-mobi format- and then getting around the duplicate content penalties.

I don't think it's possible. Duplication is duplication. Why would a .mobi extension escape the penalty when .com and many other extensions do not?

Better perhaps, to recognize duplication in any way is bad. And then go from there...

[BeachBill]

I, too, am looking for a safe way to resolve this.

"Duplication is duplication. Why would a .mobi extension escape the penalty when .com and many other extensions do not? Better perhaps, to recognize duplication in any way is bad. And then go from there..."

I agree that duplication is not good; but I am trying to make my content available for users on TWO DIFFERENT platforms.

I have a "resort" site with hundreds of captioned photographs and original narrative written for nearly 900 local businesses. I am in the process of making this information available for cell phone users.

Imagine laying on your beach blanket and being able to "surf" for a restaurant for dinner tonight, and then making a one-click call for reservations. Or, how about researching a golfcourse before calling for tomorrow morning's tee-time? Everyone on the beach or the boardwalk has a cell phone, but I [almost] never see anyone carrying a computer.

So, should I really be penalized for making useful information available to these beachgoers--even though it is a reformatted presentation [re]designed for mobile users? Should I really have to rewrite my narrative descriptions and create new captions for the photographs?

So, with that in mind, and no definitive answers, I suppose I should implement the robots.text method mentioned above; again bringing up the question, how do/can we identify the mobile-device spiders?

[Nadir]

Google has its own "mobile" crawler, in your logs, you can identify it with this user-agent: Nokia6820/2.0 (4.83) Profile/MIDP-1.0 Configuration/CLDC-1.0 (compatible; Googlebot-Mobile/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)

I don't see why you should be worried about a duplicate content "penalty". The mobile site will rank well on Google Mobile, and the normal one will rank welll on Google "Web", but not both.

If you SEO the mobile version of your site, it will rank well on Google "mobile" SERPS (when user chooses "search on mobile web"), but the regular one will not, because for Google, it is not seen as mobile friendly (too heavy, not mobile browser compliant etc), so no worries...