11.06
Google is particularly interested in separating mobile content from normal web content in order to help mobile users find relevant content for their context in the Google Mobile Web Search. With help from Google Webmaster Tools you can make your mobile content available in Google Mobile Web Search.
Here’s how you do it
Step 1 – Create a sitemap.xml for mobile content
Just like you would create a sitemap.xml for your web site, you create one for your mobile content site. Give it a name to distinguish it from your regular sitemap.xml, call it sitemap_mobile.xml or similar (don’t overwrite your original sitemap.xml file!)
Make sure the sitemap.xml contains the correct namespace tags and – a typical sitemap_mobile.xml should look something like this;
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9"
xmlns:mobile="http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap-mobile/1.0">
<url>
<loc>http://mobile.example.com/article100.html</loc>
<mobile:mobile/>
</url>
</urlset>
Priority and changefreq
One major difference from the regular sitemap.xml files you would create and use for indexing your “normal” web content is that the mobile sitemap.xml does not require the <priority> and <changefreq> tags.
As of now these tags are optional for the mobile sitemap.xml. This may change in the future, and watching the official Google blog is a great place to look for updates on this area.
Be aware of these issues
- If you plan to use a Sitemap creation tool, make sure it can create Mobile Sitemaps with correct syntax and required tags.
- A Mobile Sitemap can contain only URLs that serve mobile web content. Any URLs that serve only non-mobile web content will be ignored by the Google crawling mechanisms. If you have non-mobile content, create a separate Sitemap for those URLs.
- If the <mobile:mobile/> tag is missing, your mobile URLs won’t be properly crawled.
- URLs serving multiple markup languages can be listed in a single Sitemap.
- Each Mobile Sitemap must have a unique name.
- If you use our Sitemap Generator to create your mobile Sitemaps, you’ll need to create a separate configuration file for each mobile Sitemap.
Step 2 – submit your sitemap_mobile.xml with Google Webmaster Tools
Log in to Google Webmaster Tools with your account and click “Sitemap”. From this page, enter the URL for your published sitemap_mobile.xml you’ve created and click the “Submit Sitemap” button.
That’s it – make sure you update your sitemap when your content structure changes to avoid being punished for sitemap / crawl errors.
Bonus! Step 3 – Best practice for creating mobile content
- Use well-formed markup (WML, cHTML, XHTML Basic or XHTML MP).
- Always validate your markup. The W3C Validator can verify that your XHTML pages adhere to the markup’s syntax.
- Always use the correct DOCTYPE for the markup language you are using. An XHTML Basic 1.0-compliant page should include a DOCTYPE like this:
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML Basic 1.0//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml-basic/xhtml-basic10.dtd">
- Specify Content-Type correctly. The HTTP response should include a Content-Type header indicating the correct Internet media type for your document; it should also ideally indicate the character encoding used in the document. For example, an XHTML Basic 1.0 document using the UTF-8 character encoding should specify a header like this:
Content-Type: application/xhtml+xml;charset=UTF-8
- Review and consider adopting the accepted best practices for mobile web site development. For example, the W3C’s Mobile Web Initiative has published a series of recommendations at Mobile Web Best Practices 1.0
Make sure that Google is able to crawl your site:
- Do not restrict access to your site to particular ranges of IP addresses. This may block the Google crawler.
- Make use of the robots.txt file on your web server. This file tells crawlers which directories can and cannot be crawled. Make sure it’s current for your site so that you don’t accidentally block the Googlebot-Mobile or Googlebot crawler. Visit http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/faq.html to learn how to instruct robots when they visit your site. You can test your robots.txt file to make sure you’re using it correctly with the robots.txt analysis tool available in Google Webmaster Tools.
- Allow search bots to crawl your sites without session IDs or arguments that track their path through the site. These techniques are useful for tracking individual user behavior, but the access pattern of bots is entirely different. Using these techniques may result in incomplete indexing of your site, as bots may not be able to eliminate URLs that look different but actually point to the same page.
- Make your content available to the whole world. Google indexes public mobile web content. If your content appears to be available only to a subset of all mobile users (for example, only to subscribers of a certain mobile service provider), it may not be indexed.
