We’ve been running an AdMob.mobi site for a while, it’s been up for a few months now. It’s basically just brochureware, info about how to contact us if the only way you can get to info is from a mobile. This is the case in some areas of the world, and particularly true in some of the places we get a lot of traffic from.
While I was fooling around with Google mobile search, I realized that AdMob.mobi actually doesn’t appear at all if you do a “Mobile Web” search from Google. I thought maybe somehow the Googlebot had missed it. Not the case. There are plenty of Googlebot hits against that website. So then I did a web search via the mobile interface. Our normal website is right up at top, everything okay. It turns out the AdMob.mobi version does appear in the web search, as result number 156. Wow that’s really far down the list. And when you click through from a phone you go to a Google transcoded version.
When I hopped online and started talking to some folks there were a lot of reports of the same kind of thing. Google doesn’t rank .mobi sites very high cause it takes domain registration length into account when figuring out how to weight sites. It also doesn’t really pay much attention to the variant of markup that a site uses, and has been just shoving everything through the transcoder.
That’s really kinda disappointing. With all the current push in mobile – from mobile browsers finally starting to support sane markup languages and palatable variants of CSS up through tools like the Mobi Ready Report and the machine readable mobileOK effort going on at the W3C – it feels like we’re generally getting to a state where site owners can put up a mobile version without too much effort and in a format they find appealing and consistent. But one of the main avenues through which people should be able to find this mobile stuff has actually turned out to be something of a blocker.
This kind of site should rank better in the “Mobile Web” search and in the new combined search interface you see as part of the new mobile search interface. If admob.mobi wasn’t showing up in the mobile web index, I think it was merely that it hadn’t been found yet I imagine for some reason. .mobi sites should definitely be appearing on mobile search. I have reason to believe we’ll get many more .mobi sites soon as we’ve been taking steps to make sure we’re finding some sites that we may have been missing in the past. It is sometimes surprisingly difficult to locate all of the mobile web pages out there due to the nature of the mobile web.
It was pretty far down even in the new interface, and didn’t appear at all under web search in the old interface. I’ll keep an eye on it though, I would love to see it pop up higher in the ranking.
Don’t fret too much. Different search engines are naturally adapting and moving towards .mobi for listing mobile friendly sites.
Yahoo has started to rank .mobi higher than .com sites on their yahoo.mobi or yahoo one search.
For instance, my AreaCodeFinder.mobi website is ranked 1st when you type in “area code finder” in there mobile search engine. Also, when you type in admob, admob.mobi appears first.
You should also consider re-designing admob.mobi and give it some functionality. Let users view their accounts/balances, etc.
Good luck!
Mike
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This new site was just placed online today to provide a search directory for .mobi only websites. Users can add their sites for free, it was created so that as .mobi websites are created they can be found.
Thanks for your information and guidance.