Crawling and Ranking the Mobile Web with Google

My business with Mosaic Services started when they won my project through bidding. I hired them for their SEO services for my website..

(A good read for website optimization or website promotion on mobile and handheld devices)

As mobile search evolves it is difficult to comprehend how various search engines will index and rank pages. As an SEO Services provider, it becomes need of the hour to keep posted on the technology & updates in Google Algo. As of now, the one factor that seems to be taking prominence in Search engine rankings is onsite/ on page optimization. The extent to which your page/site is optimized to display content on the mobile web plays a very important role in the SERPs. The display ability of a certain document would again depend on the mobile device being used. For example a document being displayed on a Nokia N series mobile phone may not necessarily be displayable on a Blackberry. Again within the N series there may be document formats and documents supported by one model but not by another. The screen sizes would again differ across various brands and models.

‘Electronic Content Classification’ is one of the patents that have been published by Google. This patent, filed on Dec 21, 2006 provides insights into how Google classifies and displays documents.

Broadly, the steps involved are:

• Obtaining the Electronic documents
• Determining the format of the documents
• Determining the display ability of the documents.

There are both explicit and implicit factors that could determine the kind of document. Explicit factors could include:

• Doctype tags
• File type extensions
• Content type labels etc
• The URL (Google supports .mobi for mobile sites and could give such domains higher preference in ranking)

Implicit factors could include the formats as expressed by the features of the document.

• <wml>,<xhtml> tags
• Access key tag
• Number of images, words etc
• Number of links from the document to other documents.
• Number of tables

A combination of the explicit and the implicit features may be used to determine the score of a document for display ability on a particular device. What this means is that rich content documents might rank better on mobile devices that would be able to display the richness but will not rank high on devices with limited display abilities.

It is also stated that certain explicit features such as the document type might hold more weight that the implicit features.
The degree to which a document matches relevant features of a standard represents the score of the document for a certain standard. This score would then be used in listing the document identifier on the SERPs.
Content for mobile devices could also be identified through other tags such as ‘click to call’ tags.

The crawling pattern for mobile documents would be as follows:

• Determine document format
• Check if Document format is compatible with mobile standards
• If document is compatible, include document in the index and check for other links and urls on the document
• If document is incompatible but above a certain threshold in terms of a certain document format, don’t include the document in the index but crawl other links and urls on the document.

The above would warrant a document’s entry into the mobile index. However now what is needed is to determine if a document can be displayed on a particular device or not.

This is determined by using simple metrics such as

• Document size
• Number of images
• Size of images
• Number of words
• Use of legal and illegal tags

Each of these features of a document could be mapped against the display capabilities of a particular device stored as heuristic rules. Display information is updated regularly based on information retrieved from the users mobile.

A compound score is now calculated for each document scored for each device type. This compound score assists in ranking the documents on a particular device type.

The index would hold information on the document such as location information, the keywords associated with the document, the content format, the compatible devices and the overall confidence score of the document.

The ranking of the documents would therefore now depend on the

• Confidence score of the document
• Device type
• Content type(for example : xhtml documents may be ranked higher than wml documents)

It is important to note that the standards for the mobile web are still being set. As such it is difficult to predict to a degree of certainty as to how the future of Mobile SEO would look. What is certain, however, is that the opportunities for the marketer are endless. The trick lies in making full use of the crumbs that fall on the way and charting a way out of the maze.