The biggest search industry buzz for the past year has been mobile search. No doubt because the mobile market is growing at phenomenal rates there will be a huge opportunity for the search industry to cash in on it. As most assumed Google has entrenched itself quite quickly in the mobile search market and professionals like me are watching (and testing) what they are doing very closely, lest we be left behind.
Thus far it appears Google mobile search results are almost identical to their bigger brother’s. We have been testing many search terms and have found very similar first page results, rank-wise. With the only differences seeming to be in the descriptions and sometimes a blog post or piece of news seems to sneak its way in (this could also be because of the various data centers but we are still testing this out). It appears all data is taken from the same cache snapshots and it does not appear that any tld (like .mobi) nor any specific pages made for mobile viewing have an advantage in the SERP’s. I should point out that I use an iPhone and that is where almost all my testing has been done so far.
I will have some of the others here test on their own phones, Blackberry’s etc… and post the results shortly. Considering how much resources Google has invested into their search algorythm I would expect the mobile search to always follow similar ranking rules with maybe a few tweaks. I am not sure Google will ever give preference to mobile optimized sites because most sites seem to show up just fine and it would be too easy to open that door for folks to manipulate the search engines and gain an unfair advantage. Google has fought spam too hard to let it back into their mobile results.
My conclusion as an SEO expert is that if you want to rank well in Google mobile then you need to stick to the tested and proven SEO methods that already work. Don’t run out and buy a buch of .mobi’s and don’t create mirror sites for mobile use only. Instead spend your time build rank and trust and you will continue to thrive in the rankings.
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.
