Suzzicks over at SEOmoz recently posted about the phenomenon of mobile sites ranking in traditional search results as well as the inverse, traditional sites ranking on mobile devices. She argues that it’s something we need to explore and address as SEOs and we’ve summarized her points for you here.

Will everything be on one index soon?

Google obviously doesn’t want to have to index two totally different versions of the web, and creating one giant index with a multiple host is the clear solution. Multi-format site mapping may be a precursor to the merge, and Google themselves have said that they intend to use mobile bots to search everything soon. Interestingly, the site mapping changes occurred around the same time Caffeine kicked in as well as some major Places pages and Images updates. It seems like Google’s getting even further away from indexing multiple formats and moving to one, streamlined solution.

Certain types of phones getting certain results?

It’s impossible to know for sure if there are in fact different “mobile” indexes, even though Google had confirmed that there were in the beginning. These old results used to be terrible and Google’s been playing around with tons of different domain formats to serve up mobile results.

Mobile bots definitely make differentiations for different handsets and some serve up mobile results better than others. Doing a quick search for mobile results right on your desktop shows you the standard “SmartPhone” results served up by Google. Change the attribute at the bottom of the page to include Feature Phones, and you can see what others are seeing on various types of devices.

Tell the Search Engines You’re Mobile Friendly

The best way to tell the engines that you’re ready is to actually provide a page that is designed for mobile. You can use style sheets and mobile sitemaps to describe to the engines how you want your page to be displayed. Make sure to check your pages to see if they show up properly on mobile devices and also set you systems to ensure that the right pages are being served up to the right devices.

Here are Your Different Mobile Usability Types:

  1. Mobile/Traditional Hybrid Pages
  2. Traditional Computer Pages and Mobile Pages for Phone
  3. Mobile/Traditional Pages (Hybrid) for Computer and Smartphone
  4. Traditional Pages for Computers