If you use mobile-specific URLs to display your mobile content, what option do you use? DotMobi or DotCom? And if you use DotCom as your mobile top level domain (TLD), do you use a mobile subdomain like “m.” or “mobile.”, or do you indicate feature phone compatibility with “wap.” or touchscreen functionality like “touch.”? Maybe you don’t use a subdomain at all, but simply use your TLD plus a subfolder named m/ or mobile/.
I’ve seen all of these and more, and while I don’t think mobile usability has much at all to do with mobile SEO for Google at the moment, adhering to standards could make it easier for Google and other search engines to understand that your site is intended for a mobile audience, and might affect rankings sometime in the future. So if you’re creating a new mobile site and you want to use mobile-specific URLs, which option is best?
I have an opinion on which option is best from an SEO perspective, and it’s a bit more complicated than this, but if you’re curious about the most popular mobile URL configuration, you’ve come to the right place.
In looking at URL options for mobile sites, currently the option with the most pages indexed in Google is…
m.*.com. By a landslide.
Mobile URLs are not the only option, as you can also use handheld stylesheets for your desktop content and use the same URLs.
I have an idea of which of these is the best option, but the opinion I’m most interested in is yours. Do you follow the leader and use m.*.com to display your mobile content, or do you use something else? If something else, what’s your reasoning for deviating from the herd?
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I was watching a video from Matt Cutts from Google about duplicate content and how the search engine does not penalize you if you use m. or mobile in your domain. But he kept mentioning m. so I think m. is the way to go, especially for google search results
I am agree with what Dolphin Swim Man stated about duplicate content issue. So, I will also go for m.*.com if i create a mobile version of any website.
how do i know google indexed urls of my mobile website?
You can just do a site: search in Google or Google mobile (e.g. https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=site%3Am.mobizill.com and http://www.google.com/xhtml?q=site%3Am.mobizill.com). But if you own the site you can verify it in Google Webmaster Tools and they’ll tell you a lot more than pages indexed.