Google: Use Single URL Without Redirect For Serving Smart Phone Content

Jun 6, 2011 - 8:30 am 24 by

Google Mobile SEOJohn Mueller, aka JohnMu, ran a Google Buzz Q&A on Friday on Mobile Websites & Google's crawling, indexing and ranking.

He answered a bunch of questions on mobile SEO topics. We covered it extensively in the past with our Google on Mobile SEO and SEO & print URLs.

I wanted to highlight one answer JohnMu gave in this Q&A:

John Mueller - @Paul If you have "smartphone" content (which we see as normal web-content, as it's generally a normal HTML page, just tweaked in layout for smaller displays) you can use the rel=canonical to point to your desktop version. This helps us to focus on the desktop version for web-search. When users visit that desktop version with a smartphone, you can redirect them to the mobile version. This works regardless of the URL structure, so you don't need to use subdomains / subdirectories for smartphone-mobile sites. Even better however is to use the same URLs and to show the appropriate version of the content without a redirect :).

The last line is my favorite, where John said "Even better however is to use the same URLs and to show the appropriate version of the content without a redirect."

I've been preaching this for a long time now and I am glad Google is also encouraging it now.

Anyway, I recommend reading the whole Q&A over here and checking out my previous articles with more references named Google on Mobile SEO and SEO & print URLs.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

 

Popular Categories

The Pulse of the search community

Search Video Recaps

 
Video Details More Videos Subscribe to Videos

Most Recent Articles

Search Forum Recap

Daily Search Forum Recap: November 14, 2025

Nov 14, 2025 - 10:00 am
Search Video Recaps

Search News Buzz Video Recap: Movemeber Google Update, Opal AI Spam, Discover Spam Fix, Copilot Search, Google Image Ads & More

Nov 14, 2025 - 8:01 am
Google Ads

Google Ads Advertiser Suspension Improvements: Faster & More Accurate

Nov 14, 2025 - 7:51 am
Google Ads

Google: Don't Close Your Google Ads Account To Make LSAs Work

Nov 14, 2025 - 7:41 am
Google

Google Shopping With AI Mode Comparisons, Call Store, Track Price & Agentic Checkout

Nov 14, 2025 - 7:31 am
Google Ads

Google Ads Brings Brand Inclusions To Standard Shopping Campaigns (NOPE)

Nov 14, 2025 - 7:21 am
 
Previous Story: Ad Choices Now On Google AdSense Ads