I met CTO of dotmobi James Pearce in Las Vegas at the GoMo News Blender. While sharing tequila's James raved to me about the new find.mobi mobile search engine. I jested that I didn't believe that it was any good and like a Texan cowboy he whipped out his mobile device and surfed on the site.
Within seconds I was typing Bena Roberts into the web browser. There were a few semi-relevant answers. Then I asked him to type in gomonews as we have a gomonews.mobi site.
Gomonews.mobi wasn't there. I laughed and James looked perplexed and said that he would hook me up with the Find.mobi search guru. So today, I had a lovely chat with Ronan Cremin about Find.mobi, getting indexed on mobile and SEO techniques.
But before we started Ronan gave me a some sound bites. He said, with mobile search, please remember there is nothing out there to be found. The fixed web is so large that, regardless of what you look for, you are almost guaranteed to find *something*. This is not yet the case with mobile so often times results for a purely mobile web search can be dissapointing, but the good news is that month-on-month growth in the mobile web is really fast (as much as 15%), so it is getting better all the time.
But then I took over. I first told him about my experience with mobile SEO and how to counter the issue that linking doesn't seem to matter on mobile at the moment.
We both agreed that page titles were so much more vital in mobile than ever before. He then told that me that mobile hygiene was vital to mobile SEO. I asked if by this he met using the W3C guidelines and dotmobi tools to check the quality of the WAP site? He said, "that is exactly what he meant".
“Specifically, a well-formed mobile page helps a crawler to determine that it is actually a mobile-friendly page, and worth including in its index. The mobile search engine crawlers use multiple clues to determine whether a page is mobile-friendly or not, and being well-formed and using mobile best practices is a good place to start. As an example of these, sites should use access keys and tel: links etc”.
I then steered him to the actual indexing of content on dotmobi. I quizzed as to why my mobile site wasn't there and said that the hygiene was great because it got a number 4 (see ready.mobi). He agreed that anything above a 3 was good and apologised.
He said that indexing was automatic and that Find.mobi crawls sites and then tests them in up to twenty different forms (WAP./ m./mobile./.mobi etc) to find if they are mobile ready. It then indexes the mobile version only.
I thought that was impressive, but mentioned that an index might be better as some sites are transcoded and that can mask the hygiene of the mobile version.
He countered by saying, “We'll usually have no problem picking up the transcoded versions too. Many of the sites in find.mobi are versions of desktop sites mobilised by the likes of Crisp Wireless etc”.
Ronan also said something very interesting. He said that just because a site was light on content – it didn't make it automatically mobile friendly. I thought that was interesting. I have read on several occasions that light sites are great for mobile. In fact, many blogging software companies encourage this.
But he elaborated
“The mobile web isn't just about lighter content, it is about contextually sympathetic content that is designed for people on the move. A good mobile search engine needs to filter out all of these "accidentally light" pages and separate the wheat from the chaff”.
On a competitive level, I asked if Find.mobi thought Taptu, abphone etc were friends or competitors. Ronan said, not only were they competitors – Find.mobi wanted to carve the way in how to do mobile search properly.
He said, “we're trying to lead by example - by showing how mobile search can be done if you take a fresh start”.
We also discussed Google's involvement in Find.mobi. Apparently, Google is a key investor; but this is unfortunately under NDA.
I am currently running two small SEO projects and asked Ronan if I could send him the sites for quick indexing – he said "yes – but only if they score 3 or 4 in ready.mobi" so right now he is my new best friend! Thank-you.
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