Google adds new sites to our mobile web index every time we crawl the web. To let us know about your mobile site, as well as when you make changes, simply submit a mobile Sitemap. You can do this quickly and easily using the Google Webmaster Tools.
Mobile Webmaster Guidelines
In addition, Google provides Webmaster Guidelines in order to help webmasters design and configure sites in a way that Google can find, index and rank. These guidelines remain relevant to webmasters who maintain sites that deliver content to mobile devices.
We encourage you to evaluate your site against these guidelines in order to ensure that it is crawled, indexed and ranked correctly. The technical guidelines are especially important for mobile web sites. This page reiterates several of those guidelines and adds some new ones for mobile web sites.
- Use well-formed markup (WML, cHTML, XHTML Basic or XHTML MP).
- Validate your markup. For example, the W3C Validator can verify that your XHTML pages adhere to the markup's syntax.
- Use the right DOCTYPE for the markup language you are using.
For example, an XHTML Basic 1.0-compliant page should include a
DOCTYPE like this:
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML Basic 1.0//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml-basic/xhtml-basic10.dtd"> - Specify Content-Type correctly. The HTTP response should include
a Content-Type header indicating the correct Internet media type for
your document; it should also ideally indicate the character encoding
used in the document. For example, an XHTML Basic 1.0 document using
the UTF-8 character encoding should specify a header like this:
- Content-Type: application/xhtml+xml;charset=UTF-8
- Review and consider adopting the accepted best practices for mobile web site development. For example, the W3C's Mobile Web Initiative has published a series of recommendations at Mobile Web Best Practices 1.0
- Make sure that Google is able to crawl your site:
- Do not restrict access to your site to particular ranges of IP addresses. This may block the Google crawler.
- Make use of the robots.txt file on your web server. This file tells crawlers which directories can and cannot be crawled. Make sure it's current for your site so that you don't accidentally block the Googlebot-Mobile or Googlebot crawler. Visit http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/faq.html to learn how to instruct robots when they visit your site. You can test your robots.txt file to make sure you're using it correctly with the robots.txt analysis tool available in Google Webmaster Tools.
- Allow search bots to crawl your sites without session IDs or arguments that track their path through the site. These techniques are useful for tracking individual user behavior, but the access pattern of bots is entirely different. Using these techniques may result in incomplete indexing of your site, as bots may not be able to eliminate URLs that look different but actually point to the same page.
- Make your content available to the whole world. Google indexes public mobile web content. If your content appears to be available only to a subset of all mobile users (for example, only to subscribers of a certain mobile service provider), it may not be indexed.