: Mobile URL strategy I am going to be using jQuery Mobile to create a mobile version of my site. My question is about the best practice on the location of the mobile site, specifically, the

@Murphy175

Kevin, the answer to your question strictly speaking is: it depends.

There are several factors to consider in selecting either of the options you have described, and neither is "wrong" per se. It just depends what your goal and circumstances are.

That being said, scope and scalability of your site/application are the primary concerns.

I've done a fair amount of research on this topic for 6 mo. - 1 year now (for my work on CURE.org, where we've already implemented one of these options for cure.org/blog), and in fact revisited this discussion again this week for my personal site, joelglovier.com.

So when I say that "scalability" is a concern, you have to remember that if your site is going to have continually updating content, then you have to accomodate that in both places if you have your scenario of m.site.com setup. If you're site is database driven and/or uses a good CMS, that isn't necessarily too difficult to setup.

Nevertheless, depending on how often you are creating fresh content, landing pages, or campaigns on your site, it could grow cumbersome to have to create that content twice every time.

And if you're referring to a simple portfolio site for yourself or a client, then again repurposing content (without any type of database or CMS infrastructure) can get cumbersome quickly.

But on the other hand, when you have a site like Facebook, for example - where scalability of your site/content is critical to what you're doing as a whole - then a subdomain is really very appropriate. Partly because at the web application level you're most certainly going to have a CMS or dynamic environment that will fairly easily support your ongoing content publishing to both the mobile site and the desktop site environment (after initial development of course).

The separate mobile site really allows you to feed users only the markup and content that you want them to have versus serving everything and hiding much of it via the @media -queries method or a jQuery method.

Personally, for my own simple portfolio site I've more or less settled on not having a separate mobile site because I'm not building anything that is really application level. So I'm going with CSS3 media queries, and jQuery fallback for IE users.

Here's some of the recent resources I've been thumbing through:
trentwalton.com/2011/05/10/fit-to-scale/ unstoppablerobotninja.com/entry/responsive-images/ css-tricks.com/6206-resolution-specific-stylesheets/ www.alistapart.com/articles/responsive-web-design/ www.zeldman.com/category/responsive-web-design/ thinkvitamin.com/design/getting-started-and-gotchas-of-css-media-queries/

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@Chiappetta492

You should also look into creating your website to respond based on the screen size.

Ethan Mercotte published an article describing this. This is the current trending technique for dealing with mobile of websites:
www.alistapart.com/articles/responsive-web-design/
In my opinion this is the best mobile strategy and simplifying the process for SEO as well.

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@Kevin317

Most sites choose option #2 . If you do it won't hurt your SEO as Google knows there are mobile versions of websites. That's why Google has two bots: Googlebot and Googlebot-Mobile. Googlebot crawls desktop-browser type of webpages and content embedded in them and Googlebot-Mobile crawls mobile content.

Google covered mobile SEO recently. If you're interested in mobile SEO it's worth reading.


A very common question we see is: Does it matter if the different
types of content are served from the same URL or from different URLs?
For example, some websites have example.com as the URL desktop
browsers are meant to access and have m.example.com or wap.example.com
for the different mobile devices. Other websites serve all types of
content from just one URL structure like example.com.
For Googlebot and Googlebot-Mobile, it does not matter what the URL
structure is as long as it returns exactly what a user sees too. For
example, if you redirect mobile users from example.com to
m.example.com, that will be recognized by Googlebot-Mobile and both
websites will be crawled and added to the correct index. In this case,
use a 301 redirect for both users and Googlebot-Mobile.

If you serve all types of content from example.com, i.e. serving
desktop-optimized content or mobile-optimized content from the same
URL depending on the User-agent, this will also lead to correct
crawling by Googlebot and Googlebot-Mobile. This is not considered
cloaking by Google.

It is worth repeating that regardless of URL structure, you must
correctly detect the User-agent as given by your users and
Googlebot-Mobile, and serve both the same content. Don’t forget to
keep the default content, the desktop-optimized content, for when an
unknown User-agent requests it.

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