Duplicate Content & Usability | Desktop Internet vs Mobile Web
Questions of the Day: How do we have a .com website and a .mobi website without having duplicate content?
What if it is easier to create a new .mobi website, then rearrange the .com site to work for both?
What if our .com website url is too long for the Mobile Web?
I still have questions that need to be answered before I can get the ball rolling to create a .mobi website. I am excited. I am so close, yet so far away.
I did a little research last week or usability testing. I used my mobile phone to investigate the appearance and workings of Ecreativeworks and this blog, Industrial Search Engine Marketing. Both urls were super long to type in and both appeared on the browser in a unfriendly way.
I’ll critique the Ecreativeworks’ website first. The header was too large with the additional links taking up quite a bit of scrolling space. The text was hard to read and broken up. And the navigation to get anywhere was hard to find and the again the information you ended up getting to was unorganized to read.
The Industrial Search Engine Marketing Blog was a little more organized, but the first portion of the scrolling was all the links on the left and right hand side of the website. The content was all at the bottom. If one clicked on a category they still had to scroll down to read the information. There wasn’t any anchoring to the content.
What’s the plan of action or the recommendations to make? First one would be to get domains that were shorter and easy to remember. Typing in a long domain name is a headache. The second one would be to figure out what people actually use Ecreativeworks website for on the Mobile Web. If it is to look for content, then the .com website should be rearranged for both a PC Browser or Mobile Browser. If the website would be used for contact information and a few other action items, then a new website could be in order. The new site could then have a link to the main site.
The Blog would be an easy one to implement. The website could have the content that people read, with the ability to post a note or a blog themselves if they want. Most people going to blogs, I am assuming at this point, would go for the information and the lasted post. They don’t care about some of the other links a website might offer.
I need to do a little more digging. Will we get penalized for having duplicate content between a .com and a .mobi site? And how much work do you put into a .com site, to make it user-friendly for a .mobi site?
More to come, I am sure.