Having trouble getting your mobile site indexed by Google?

Many online developers have trouble getting their mobile content indexed by Google. As a developer, it’s important, even crucial for your content to be seen by all media possible. More and more, this includes mobile venues. And because mobile sites use a different format, this can be tricky. Many times, mobile sites are designed to look good and appeal to a wide variety of mobile applications, helping them be seen by search engines is often overlooked.

Do a quick Google Mobile Search to verify your site isn’t showing up. Make sure you also check using the ’site:’ operator. For more information on search basics, check out this link. If you are still having trouble locating your website in a mobile search, there may be a problem with Googlebot’s ability to find your site. Afterall, if Googlebot can’t find your site, it won’t be able to crawl & index your website. If your content has been recently added, you should always submit your content directly to Google, to make sure they know about your site’s content.

Create a Mobile Sitemap

The first thing you should do is to create a Mobile Sitemap. If you need information on how to create a Mobile Sitemap, check out this link. Once you’ve taken the steps to create your mobile sitemap for your mobile website, you need to submit your sitemap to Google. You can submit your sitemap directly to Google in the same way you would submit a regular sitemap, by using Google Webmaster Tools. For more information on creating & using sitemaps, visit this link.

Googlebot-Mobile

Many sites designated for mobile content will refuse anything thats not a mobile phone. This presents a problem for Googlebot, because it needs to be able to get in to the site to see whats going on. If it can’t get in, then your site won’t show up in mobile searches. The crawler for mobile content is “Googlebot-Mobile”, so you need to allow any User-agent complete access to your site. Sometimes, Google may change that info, so you probably should check to see if the User-agent contains the string “Googlebot-Mobile”. To verify Googlebot, you may also use a DNS lookup.

Can Google recognize my mobile URL’s?

Google will check to see if your url is viewable on a mobile device after Googlebot has crawled the url. If they determine you have pages that are not viewable from a mobile phone, they probably won’t get included in the mobile site index. This can be confusing, because many times they will show up in a normal site index. Your DTD declaration is important to note here. Your DTD declaration (doc type definition) should be an acceptable format for mobile applications, like XHTML Mobile or Compact HTML. If you have it in an acceptable format, then the page should be eligible to be indexed for mobile searches.

This and much more information can be accessed at Google’s Mobile Webmaster Guidelines.

Dark Glass Media, Inc. is a Boca Raton based web design & development company offering extremely affordable web solutions for any business, no matter where you are located. We would love to show you how we’re ready to help your business grow. Feel free to contact us anytime at info@darkglassmedia.com