Mobile SEO - 6 Week Test

Posted by TinMan

March 5, 2007

For the past month and a half I have been running a mobile site for testing purposes.
Basically I’m using the data from one of my preexisting sites and just placed a Mobile page that accesses the data in a database using PHP.
I created a Google XML sitemap and submitted it to the Google sitemap program. This program provides some incredible data, including query stats, and a break down option that indicates from which country your traffic coming from. From my testing I found out a great amount of my traffic came from France, and South Africa and most of the query phrases included the term “free”. (I have a music related site)

What I thought was pretty interesting is that Google hit my site hard for about a solid week, sending robots/crawlers that simulated Nokia Phones.

Nokia6820/2.0 (4.83) Profile/MIDP-1.0 Configuration/CLDC-1.0 (compatible; Googlebot-Mobile/2.1)
Nokia6230i/2.0 (03.40) Profile/MIDP-2.0 Configuration/CLDC-1.1 (Google WAP Proxy/1.0)

It took me about three weeks to get included in their Mobile Web (Beta) program.
I currently receive about 250 hits from Google Mobile.

Nothing special from Yahoo yet, it appears that the same slurp crawler that crawls my mobile site, crawls my non-mobile site. Surprisingly I have not received any traffic from Yahoo yet. Maybe it takes longer, or perhaps Yahoo is going another direction with their Mobile Search. When I do a search for my phone (Treo 650) via Yahoo search, two sets of results are shown a “Web Results” and “Mobile Web Results”. The first 3 results are from my non-mobile version, the second three are for the “Mobile Web Results”.

I’m not sure if all their mobile results are the same way or just mine. That’s really confusing to me. If a user is searching via his/her cell phone directing users to a mobile formatted site makes more sense to me.

MSN live, I did receive some visibility within their mobile results, which is kind of funny. I have no trace of MSN-bot crawling the site. Currently, I have no inbound traffic from MSN.
So for now, its looks like its all about Google Mobile right now.

That’s all I have for now, as soon as I have more to report I will.
But in my overall opinion I don’t think it would hurt to create a mobile version of your site and evaluate the traffic for yourself. It’s traffic, we can all use some more traffic.

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