Effective Internet Marketing.

Redirect mobile visitors to your mobile site

One of the most common problems for webmasters who run both mobile and desktop versions of a site is that the mobile version of the site appears for users on a desktop computer, or that the desktop version of the site appears when someone accesses it on a mobile device.   In dealing with this scenario, here are two viable options:

Redirect mobile users to the correct version

When a mobile user or crawler (like Googlebot-Mobile) accesses the desktop

version of a URL, you can redirect them to the corresponding mobile version of

the same page.

Google notices the relationship between the two versions of the URL and displays

the standard version for searches from desktops and the mobile version for mobile

searches.

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If you redirect users, please make sure that the content on the corresponding

mobile/desktop URL matches as closely as possible.

For example, if you run a shopping site and there’s an access from a mobile phone

to a desktop-version URL, make sure that the user is redirected to the mobile

version of the page for the same product, and not to the homepage of the mobile

version of the site. We occasionally find sites using this kind of redirect in an attempt

to boost their search rankings, but this practice only results in a negative user

experience, and so should be avoided at all costs.

On the other hand, when there’s an access to a mobile-version URL from a desktop

browser or by our web crawler, Googlebot, it’s not necessary to redirect them to

the desktop-version. For instance, Google doesn’t automatically redirect desktop

users from their mobile site to their desktop site; instead they include a link on the

mobile version page to the desktop version. These links are especially helpful when

a mobile site doesn’t provide the full functionality of the desktop version—users

can easily navigate to the desktop-version if they prefer.