Sitemaps Series – Part 4 Of Mobile Sitemaps
Mobile Sitemaps
We all know the extent and reach of mobile phones. Given the iPhone 5 launch, the exciting features that the Windows 8 OS plans to bring to various phones and let’s not forget the Android being launched in more phones than I can keep a tab of! The number of Smartphone users has increased dramatically worldwide over the last two years! Samsung and Apple more or less dominate the Smartphone market.
Being a website owner, it is more important now than ever to ensure that your website is mobile friendly. And once you do that; you have to make sure that Google is aware of the fact that you have specific URLs/sections for mobile users!
So, how do you go about creating a mobile sitemap?
A mobile sitemap uses all the usual tags of a normal sitemap and a mobile specific tag with an additional namespace requirement. Let’s look at a very simple example of what a mobile sitemap looks like -
- This line is the additional namespace required to tell Google that this is a mobile sitemap:
xmlns:mobile=”http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap-mobile/1.0 - This is where you specify the URL of the mobile specific pages
http://mobile.example.com/article100.html - This element tells Google that it is a mobile specific URL – <mobile:mobile/>
And that is about it! Super simple to remember!
Here is an example of a mobile sitemap – http://www.google.com/mobilesitemap.xml
A couple of things to remember -
- Ensure that your sitemap generator has provision to create mobile sitemaps
- Ensure that this sitemap only contains URLs for mobiles. Non mobile URLs will be ignored by crawlers
And that’s it!
We are creating a mobile website for one of our clients with dynamic pages and hence it was different from that of the desktop version.
Thus a mobile sitemap becomes even more important. Thanks for the tips. Really useful.
Hey,
Thanks a lot for sharing this post, my client was jumping on my head for getting this done, you have simplified this for me. Thanks again
A beautifully written post, I was looking for exactly this information, could not find it anywhere else. Thanks for sharing!
I would say it’s very strange not to have a mobile specific website these days. With more than half of the population accessing the internet thru a mobile device, it’s shocking that this still isn’t in vogue for the most part.