URL strategy mobile website

[drimlike]

Hello everyone,

We are facing a challenging decision about where our website (Flash Gaming website) is going.

We are in the process of creating html5 games in the same theme of the flash games that we provide to our users.

Now our main concern is to decide how to show this new content to the user?

Shall we create brand new set of urls such as :

http://www.mydomain.com/games/mobile/kids/

Or shall we adapt the main desktop url :

http://www.mydomain.com/games/kids/

and show the users two different versions of the page depending on whether they are using a mobile device (so they see a mobile version) or a pc/laptop (so they a see desktop version).

Or even redirect people to a sub-domain :

http://m.mydomain.com/

The main idea we had is to keep the same url structure, as it seems that google is giving the same search results if you are using a mobile device or not. And creating a new set of urls or even a sub-domain, may involve a lot of work to get those new links to the same PA as the desktop URL that is here and know since a while now.

Also the desktop page game should not be accessible to the mobile devices, so  should this be redirected (301?) to the mobile homepage of the site?

But how google will look at the fact that one url is giving 2 different contents, CSS etc, and also all those redirects might look strange... we are worried that doing so will hurt the page authority and its ranking ... but we are trying to find the best way to combine SEO and user experience.

Any input on this will be really appreciated.

Cheers,

[drimlike]

Jason,

Thanks for your answer, yeah the issue that we have is that the site is a flash gaming site, and as you know flash is not running on Apple and really slow on other mobile devices, so the solution is to give access to only html5 games to our users rather than having huge bounce rates on flash based games.

This said now, if my page /games list all the games for desktop, do you think it will be wise to keep this page and only show the html5 one to the mobile user, but this will give 2 different version of the page to google, or will it be better to create /games/mobile and don't let users that use mobile device see /games that should only be accessible if you are not using a mobile device.

I am like you it will be better to keep everything under one domain rather than going for the subdomain route.

Cheers,

[retailgeek]

Googles recommended approach is to have the same URL for mobile and desktop optimized pages:

https://developers.google.com/webmasters/smartphone-sites/details

This is obviously the safest way to insure your SEO value is aggregated between mobile and desktop visitors.

I also favor universal URL's because so many users now use multiple devices.  How often will a user hear about your service, when they are out and about and look at your site on their mobile device, and then bookmark it or e-mail it to themselves, to review at more depth on their laptop at home.  Do you really want them to see the mobile optimized version of your site on their laptop?

Note, if you feel that users visiting your site on a mobile device are trying to perform very different user tasks than desktop users, and so the functionality of the pages is widely different, then I would recommend using a separate URL scheme.