SEO Tips (Part 1)

1. Canonical Links

If any pages on your mobile website contain a paragraph or more of content copied or syndicated from the desktop site,  then one of your sites (desktop or mobile, or sometimes both) is at risk for duplicate content penalties. Google penalizes you for duplicate content by lowering your rankings or removing you from search results entirely.

Luckily, there is a simple cure for that. All you need to do is place a Link element with rel=canonical attribute (referencing a desktop page)  in the head sections of your mobile pages that contain the duplicate content.

Here is the syntax for that:

<link rel=”canonical” href=”http://www.example.com/page.html” />

where “http://www.example.com/page.html” is the full web address of the desktop page with the original content.

To add the link with “rel=canonical” attribute on your site, simply open the page in Page Editor, and add the element into the Header HTML Insert box in SEO and Access section on the bottom right:

Add this element to every mobile page that contains some of the duplicate content from the desktop site.

This basically tells Google not to index the mobile page, and to refer to the desktop page instead.

Ideally, you should also put a “rel=alternate” attribute to the corresponding pages on the desktop site:

<link rel=”alternate” media=”only screen and (max-width: 640px)” href=”http://m.example.com/page.html” />

This tells Google that m.example.com/page.html is a corresponding mobile page

2.  Mobile Sitemap

While not a requirement, a mobile sitemap is another way to tell Google that the site is a mobile site. A mobile sitemap is similar to the regular sitemap, only it contains an additional < mobile > tag, and references a difference namespace. Here is an example of a mobile sitemap:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>
 <urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9"
  xmlns:mobile="http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap-mobile/1.0">
    <url>
        <loc>http://mobile.example.com/article100.html</loc>
        <mobile:mobile/>
    </url>
</urlset>

Here is another example of a mobile sitemap: http://www.google.com/mobilesitemap.xml.

Any mobile sitemap generator tool works, as long as it follows the above format. We’ve used http://www.madsubmitter.com/mobile-sitemaps/ successfully in the past.

Once you generate your mobile sitemap, you need to save it to your computer and then upload it to the root folder of your mobile website.
To upload your sitemap to the platform, you simply need to click on the Settings link on the website dashboard, and upload your sitemap there:

Once you’ve uploaded your sitemap, go to Google Webmaster Tools (you may need to register there if you don’t have an account already) and submit your sitemap. It will ask you to verify that you have ownership of the site by asking you to either upload a file to your mobile site or add a verification tag. If you are using the platform to build your mobile site, pick the Mega Tag Verification method, and then simply copy and paste the meta tag into the same settings window (see screenshot above).

After you submit the mobile site map with Google Webmaster Tools, check the “mobile” section of your sitemap report (this tells you how many pages in your sitemap were detected by Google as mobile-optimized):

Submitting a mobile sitemap tells Google that your website contains mobile-optimized content and should only be included in mobile search results.