I’m a big fan of the Google Webmaster Central Channel on YouTube, which is really a great training resource for both beginner and experienced SEOs and webmasters. Yesterday I stumbled across this video and presentation from Google’s Ankit Gupta from Google SearchMasters India conference on Building Mobile Friendly Web Sites.
Not all of it is relevant for SEOs, and the sound is almost indecipherable, but it does include this bit of text in the presentation that confirms that Google is blending mobile web sites with desktop results a la Nadir’s analysis of the Google patent for blending mobile search results:
Google classifies a websites as mobile enabled based on certain signals like page layout, markups used, etc. When a user searches for “Mobile” websites only, only if the website is classified as Mobile websites by Google, it will show up. When a user searches for “Everything”, Google blends mobile websites with regular desktop websites. Mobile websites get a boost if certain quality metrics hold
In other words, apart from the indexing challenges inherent in mobile SEO, there are separate ranking algorithms and results for mobile content that seek to promote a positive mobile user experience.
Yet, in spite of this, I rarely, even in 2009, see mobile SEO discussed as anything other than desktop SEO applied to mobile web pages. I’ve argued that this is nonsense many times before, but here’s hoping that hearing it from a Google engineer will help the message stick with the unconverted.