Mobile SEO: After Google’s Panda / Penguin latest updates

Mobile especially smartphone usage in India will soon exceed the internet usage on desktop. Mobile SEO is a complicated area. As mobile devices are controlling the web day by day, marketers have started creating mobile websites. In this hustle, the best procedures of SEO are repeatedly ignored in support of fast deployment.

However, ‘search’ is the best way to reach the mobile users. Mobile search does not give just one result. It displays many results and different presentations based on whether the search query is from a basic phone or from Smartphone’s or from tablets. The mobile companies are now estimating the mobile websites from SEO’s point of view. Luckily, Google’s mobile services and guidelines are released; these guidelines help the marketers to understand and apply solid mobile SEO.One major issue that has been discussing for many years is that if the mobile sites should be developed on unique mobile URL’s or should these mobile sites use responsive web design to assist both the mobile and the desktop content under the same set of URLs.

Google has finally worked on this issue and came up with a clear guideline. Google says ‘ mobile sites that  assist both the desktop and the mobile content under the same URL, with every URL assisting the same HTML for all the mobile and desktop devices and just making use of CSS to redesign the mobile content. This is the best way of serving mobile content.

This is not the only option that Google supports. Few other options include: mobile sites having separate URL’s to both the mobile and the desktop. One other option is that the mobile sites that assist all the devices under the same URL, but each of these UMLs assist different HTML based on whether the user agent is a mobile device or desktop.

Even if Google prefers using responsive design, sites that have already started using mobile URLs don’t have to redesign their entire site. Google does prefer the responsive design but not at the cost of user experience.
There are few marketers who are confused between dynamic HTML serving and responsive design. The difference is that responsive design just affects the CSS of a page and the actual HTML remains the same. On the other hand, dynamic serving is intended for HTML content and CSS to change based on user’s device, even while the URL of the page is same.

One of the interesting features that Google is now supporting is the ‘Switchboard tags’. For the sites, that need to keep mobile unique URL’s, marketers can now send signal to Google to help it identify mobile content from the desktop content. Few of the other SEO notes include Mobile SEO for Bing, Optimization beyond responsive design and stay away from Robots.txt blocks.