Google Mobile Sitemaps & Adaptive Layouts ( or sites that don't have different urls for “mobile” pages )

Question

I change the layout of my page with CSS depending on the amount of space the device has to work with. I use semantic HTML so if there's no style sheet support it falls back to just an easy to understand HTML page. My urls are the same for every device that comes across the website no matter what device or browser they're on.

However, I read through "Google's SEO Starter Guide" and it suggests that I should let them know about a mobile version of the website. This seems like the right thing to do with the recent explosion of people using mobile devices to surf the web and how much attention Google is paying to it. My issue is that all my URLs are the same and Google appears to want mobile content served in a special way ( WML, XHTML Mobile Profile, Etc...) so I'm not sure how I should approach it.

Should I even bother submitting a mobilesitemap.xml to Google? If I do should I append something to the url to make it different from the regular site like "?mobile"? Should I change the doctype when this is present and hope I never anyone arrive at the link with IE? Am I worried about nothing?

Also, is there a difference between a "mobile site" and a "mobile friendly site"? I see Google embracing media queries so it leads me to think that I should just sit back and let Google so its thing but I want to make sure I'm not missing out on traffic for my clients.

Any insight would be awesome.

Answer 1

Mobile sitemaps look like they were designed for when mobiles weren't using HTML, but iMode and WAP, though they do support HTML pages too. What Google wanted you to do was to be able to say which pages they should crawl which they might otherwise not find out about.

The guidelines say

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.

I wouldn't bother making a separate mobile site just so you can submit a sitemap as they will find your main site anyway. With the explosion of different "mobile" devices, some of which may have the same resolutions as desktop PCs it's best just to design for resolutions and input capabilities rather than design for one particular type of mobile device.

Answer 2

You should actually make a mobile sitemap with just the same URLs in it according to the spec. This will make Google crawl your site with their mobile bot, which comes in a few different flavors, iPhone and some other ones.