Google's Matt Cutts On Using Different Interfaces For Mobile Users

Sep 4, 2009 - 8:30 am 0 — by

The topic of cloaking or IP deliver or useragent delivery is always a very touchy topic in the SEO industry. I am not going to get into the history, but in short, webmasters can use various methods to show GoogleBot one piece of content and the user a different piece of content. Now, there is a gray area in that space. For example, hiding certain links or content from GoogleBot, while showing it to searchers, at the same time, showing the primary content to GoogleBot. That is why this is a touchy topic, Google wants to take a hard stance against cloaking and forms of it, but at the same time, there are very valid reasons for it.

In a recent video by Matt Cutts he discusses why showing a mobile version of a web site is 100% okay by Google. In short, as long as you show GoogleBot the same site normal web browsers see, then you are okay. Having a mobile version or print version of your site is fine, just don't show it to GoogleBot. Here is the quick video:

A week or two ago, I go through, in detail, how I implemented this for my corporate site. You can read about it over here.

Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.

 

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