Pretty big SEO oversight

[realmaverickuk]

Since updating our website to 3.2, we'd not used the mobile skin, because we wanted to "mobilize" the rest of the website, before we release it to the public.

When I first started working on it, I was a little surprised that the <H1> tags were all "sitename". The actual post title, is relegated to <h2>. I'm not entirely sure why that is, however, it's easily fixed within the templates, if you know what you're doing. However, this should be rectified, an update of the mobile skin pushed out. As most users won't even be aware the issue exists.

We released the mobile site a couple of days ago, and as I like to test things, I wanted to ensure that Googlemobile spider, was able to see the mobile website. In theory, it should be able to, as the bot by default, will pickup Android and iPhone user agents, however it wasn't. Which I guess makes the first part of the issue, a non-issue, as Google currently cannot even crawl your clients mobile skins.

In an attempt to override the default behaviour, we added the Googlebot mobile useragent, but still the mobile skin isn't being served to Google mobile.

It looks like something inside /admin/sources/classes/output/publicOutput.php is overriding it and forcing the main skin to be shown. But I'm a little scared messing about with that file.

Why is this even an issue? Having a mobile skin, will help improve rankings in the mobile search results, it's also a major positive signal to the search engines, that you're serving optimised content. But as Google has no idea the mobile skin even exists, we cannot benefit from it.

Surprisingly, I cannot find a single thread on this topic, which means it's likely nobody even knows there is an issue.

No doubt, there is some logic as to why you chose to serve Googlebot mobile the full skin, but honestly, it needs to be changed.

So to recap, the following should be changed:

1.

<h1>

<a accesskey="1" rel="home" title="Go to community index" href="http://community.invisionpower.com/index.php?">Invision Power Services</a>

</h1>

Needs changing to

<div id="headerOrWhatever">

<a accesskey="1" rel="home" title="Go to community index" href="http://community.invisionpower.com/index.php?">Invision Power Services</a>

</div>

2. <h2> titles, need to be changed to <h1>

3. Google mobile spider, needs to be served the mobile skin. (not quite sure how yet, hoping you'll be able to tell me).

On a more positive note, glad to see you listened to my advice, and extend the paging beyond <prev> and <next>. Hopefully, this is also default, in IPB 3.3.1?


Thanks for listening.

[realmaverickuk]

Or I guess leave it as it is, and I can release a mod for it. :)