Google On Designing Mobile Friendly Websites

Hi Everybody,
I’ve pulled out the key points from this post in bullet format :

1. Google differentiates between traditional mobile phones and smartphones.

2. 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.

3. Currently only traditional phones are supported with special useragent strings within Googlebot-Mobile, not smartphones (this may change)

4. Google said they “expect smartphones to handle desktop experience content so there is no real need for mobile-specific effort from webmasters.

5. 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.”

6. 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.

7. Using the same URL “is not considered cloaking by Google.”

8. 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.

This post is beneficial to understand that you do not need to use a mobile specific URL, you can serve up mobile content on the same URLs you serve up to desktop users.