We had a bit of a dillema when adding this functionality, since in order to maintain session states for devices which do not have cookies enabled, you need to store the jsessionid in the parameters, and we removed the functionality for this when we began our mobile seo experiments. This was because we saw that google had picked up the sites with different jsessionid’s and were treating the same pages as different pages but with the same content and thus punsishing our rankings for it. However, I have read that google now has better support for both query parameters and jsession id’s… so lets see because afterall the most important thing is the mobile analytics - since without it you can’t really tell if your mobile seo is working optimally or not.

We now have 4 versions of mobislim. There is mobislim.com sa.mobislim.com which has some south african commedy videos on it and there is also the d2c.mobislim.com which we built for TMobile in the States. Finally there is the iphone version of mobislim. It is still on a staging url but I will put it onto a proper mobislim url soon and write about the fun I had with javascript, ajax, dodgy stylesheets etc doing that…

I have now checked about 1 weeklater and this is no longer the case and our rankings for spurs animations has dropped. Lets see what happens now with a fresh bit of off page mobile search engine optimisation.

We have already captured our page rank at the begining of the month and today I have some captured some interesting resutls already. It seems that this blog itself is enancing the page rank on mobislim! My trusty colleague Maria Sanchez is going to come up with a list of tough and competetive terms which we want mobislim to rank for. I will update when I hear more from her on the mobile analytics and mobile slimming blog.

Due to the change in url formats, I now need to go and perform a load of 301 redirects so that we do notlose the page rank on our old pages.

An example page for the old slimming diets sections is:

http://mobislim.com/viewZone.jsp?p=auxu_zx2

An example page for the new slimming diets section is:

http://mobislim.com/k-fve/zone/2/slimming-diets.htm

An example page for an old article is:

http://mobislim.com/viewAricle.jsp?p=ax3

An example page for a new article is:

http://mobislim.com/k-zfve/slimming-diets/article/3/the-less-food-diet.htm

Hopefully google will like the *new look* url’s as much as I do!

Update: Having major problems comming up with an apache rewrite rule to do perform the above re-writing, kind of because the rule involves using both bits from the url and also the parameters. Ah, I’ve just figured what I need to do now! Back to the drawing board…

Scorch Controller ensures that the cms publishes search engine friendly url’s. But simply putting mobislim under Scorch Control was not a big enough challenge for the day. I am therefore currently working on enhancing the ScorchControl to:

• Create a dynamic page title based on the current asset / page command function.
• Read in meta data from the current asset and if present use this to populate the “decription” and “keywords” meta tags. (This requires adding these fields to the asset object, and creating setters for these in the CMS.
• Generate related tags for articles / assets. i.e. if an article is tagged with “health”, “slimming” and “diet-pills”. Then when on the view articles page, there will be links for health, slimming and diet pills, which list all articles containing these tags.

We can then create a google mobile site map for the new mobile seo friendly url’s.

I propose to have the above all running and migrated by the crack of dawn tomorrow. The fact that I can do this within this time frame is all down to the beauty that is Spring MVC - the Java framework which the Scorch Controller is implemented in.

More soon!