Does having a separate mobile website hurt my SEO?

A question we are frequently asked is whether having a separate mobile website will create SEO issues?  (A separate mobile url is one that starts with m. and redirects to the mobil url – i.e., m.vicimediainc.com.)

The answer is “no” if it is done correctly – and we do it the correct way!  (As outlined by Google in this article.)  If your new mobile website and your existing desktop site are not properly tagged, then when search engines (such as a Googlebot) crawl both sites it may see the two as having duplicate content and penalize your search ranking.

However, having two different websites is perfectly acceptable by Google (and other search engines) as long as there is a link tag to address the duplicate content issue. We add this automatically to every page of the mobile website we create for you.

Want the full “techie” explanation?  Here it goes:

The exact tag is the rel=”canonical” tag, which tells search engines that this page on mobile is related to this page on desktop, and to not see it as duplicate content.

Here’s the canonical tag, as an example:

<link rel=”canonical” href=”http://www.example.com/page-1″ >

Got that?  Good!