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Google On Designing Mobile Friendly Websites

 

Pierre Far from Google wrote a blog post on how to design mobile friendly websites while considering Google's webmaster guidelines and best practices.

I've pulled out the key points from this post in bullet format:

• Google differentiates between traditional mobile phones and smartphones.
• 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.
• Currently only traditional phones are supported with special useragent strings within Googlebot-Mobile, not smartphones (this may change)
• Google said they "expect smartphones to handle desktop experience content so there is no real need for mobile-specific effort from webmasters.
• It does not mean you can't serve a special style sheet to smartphones, Google said, "the decision to do so should be based on how you can best serve your users."
• URL structure: 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.
• Using the same URL "is not considered cloaking by Google."
• Mobile sitemaps: you should include only mobile content URLs in Mobile Sitemaps, even if these URLs also return non-mobile content when accessed by a non-mobile User-agent.