Mobile Phone Content Meta Tag
September 4th, 2009 by Brian KingWe recently developed a mobile version of one of our web sites publishing and treating it as a sub-domain of the main web site. It was actually fun creating this mini version of the web site ensuring everything displayed properly on a mobile phone. We used my LG U990 mobile phone for testing purposes.
A few weeks after its launch we noticed that the mobile content was indexed with many search engines alongside the content of the main web site. While this is good news, the bad news was that the mobile content was being indexed higher than the main content, meaning traffic was being redirected to the mobile web site.
I found a clever script that automatically redirected traffic based on the type of browser they were using but I was only able to do this for our home page. My concerns were, 1. we might get pinged for duplicate content, 2. perfectly good traffic was being diverted to the mobile site unnecessarily, 3, falling Adsense revenue due to the lost traffic to the main site where there are better and more prominent advertisers.
After a few weeks we decided to move the mobile web site to its own domain which allowed me to overcome some of the problems we were experiencing. I slapped a no-index on the web site to stop search engines from indexing the content, which led me to this thought..
Wouldn’t it be great if there was a Mobile Phone Content Meta Tag, that search engines would use to display relevant content based on the browser of the reader. If they were searching using a mobile phone, then the results would be pages that were “Mobile Phone Friendly”.
What do you reckon?
Links and sources
- Main web site www.onlymelbourne.com.au is about Melbourne
- Mobile web site www.melbournemobile.com.au
- Detect Mobile User Agents & Browsers www.detectmobilebrowsers.mobi
- Only Mobile Phones
Tags: Content, Meta Tag, Mobile Phone
