Search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo don’t give a hoot if you have a mobile compatible web site or not
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 :).
That’s right – websites designed for mobile users do NOT receive any special treatment from the search engines. In other words, searches from a mobile smartphone are treated just like any other search from a regular computer.
If you take out your smartphone and do a search, you’ll notice that search engines do not rank mobile sites higher unless you add “mobile” or some other unique keyword to your phrase.
Let’s be clear though – having a site optimized for mobile users is absolutely important.
The big impact in terms of SEO and mobile smartphones is local search. Here’s where sites designed for mobile devices are treated differently than desktop sites (…notice, they treat them differently, not better).
Google and others essentially assume that a mobile search is local. In fact, statistics show that there is a 33% or higher chance you’re looking for something local when using your smartphone.
For example, if you type in “Best Buy” on your mobile device, it’s assumed you’re looking for the local Best Buy store in your town.
