Mobile URL strategy

Mobile
1

I am going to be using jQuery Mobile to create a mobile version of my site.

My question is about the best practice on the location of the mobile site, specifically, the URL. I am looking into two options:

  1. Just detect whether the user is mobile and serve them a mobile template, no need for a separate URL for the mobile site. For example, mysite.com/foo/bar would have a mobile and desktop version of the page. My site uses HTTP cache and this would complicate things…
  2. Have a mobile URL (m.mysite.com). I prefer this method as I see this in a lot of places (ie m.facebook.com). My hesitation is with SEO, isn’t duplicating content bad?

Any insights, thoughts, comments on my dilemma? Is there a strategy I am missing?

Thanks!

2

Option #2 is better.

I am using that on my website. All I did to avoid duplicate content is put “<meta name=“robots” content=“noindex” />” inside the header tag.

You might also want to detect the user agent of your visitors and redirect them accordingly.

3

Great. Thanks.

4

You could also use rel=“canonical” more info can be found here: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=139394