How to Get Rid of Duplicate Content Issue in case of Mobile Sites?

Do you have a separate website for mobile users? Or do you think having a single website for both desktop users and mobile users is fine? Whatever you support, but read on this blog of mine on how to get rid of duplicate content in case of mobile sites?

With the increase of smartphones in the market, more and more people are now using mobile phones to access internet. Each and every website owner are now targeting mobile search, as it is the future of the search industry. We all want to get the top ranking and without providing a mobile friendly website to our users we cannot even think about reaching to the top.

How to Make Mobile Friendly Website? 

Let us first discuss about how we can provide an easiest solution of this issue.

We can have two ways to present our website for mobile search. The first approach is to make a separate site of lighter version and place it into a sub-domain like m.yoursitename.com and thus user can be able to access the mobile version of your website quite easily from their mobile phones.

The speed of your website will increase on mobile phones.

The second way to do this is to make your website responsive and it will automatically change its shape and dimension based on the devices where people are accessing it. Those who are not at all aware of what exactly is a responsive website should check my blog post on SEO benefits of responsive web design.

How to Get Rid of Duplicate Content Issue in case of Mobile Sites? 

Coming back to our original discussion of how we can get rid of this duplicate content issue which can arise from it. Many webmaster and even some SEO persons do feel that developing a separate site might cause duplicate content issue, as then you will have another copy of the same content.

Considering the fact that creating a separate site like m.sitename.com might create such issues, but honestly speaking it is not true. Google also considers that this version is for mobile users and the site also has one separate version for desktop users.

Recently John Mueller of Google also confirmed the same in a Google Webmaster help thread, as per him you need not to worry about duplicate content if you are providing a separate site for your mobile users, unless and until it is annotated appropriately. As per John it is also a bad thing to block the mobile site so that Google should not treat it as a duplicate content, as then Google will not be able to access it and provide you the benefits of having a mobile version site.

On the other hand if you are using the same domain name for both your desktop and mobile users, then you need not to worry about duplicate content as in both the cases same version of site will open.

You can read all about this at this place: https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/webmasters/7h6jMw6DCek/discussion

Hope it can clear your doubt about duplicate content issue with mobile versions of your website.

What is The Best Solution? 

What will be the conclusion of this blog post?

What is the best solution for displaying site to mobile users?

If you ask me the best solutions of this issue is to have a responsive design as it will definitely help you to have single domain for your desktop users as well as mobile users too.

Those who are using WordPress can easily search for responsive themes like I usually get from My Theme Shop and make my blogs or sites as responsive.

Those who are not using WordPress as the backend of their website need to contact their designers for an upgrade.

I guess this small discussion will help you to understand which approach you should adopt to display different and light version of your website to your mobile visitors. Please don’t hesitate in sharing your opinion about this blog post of mine. I would be glad to hear which approach are you planning to follow, if you have not yet chosen any option for your mobile users.