The Mobile Developer

Quite a lot of development has gone into mobislim recently. We have added the latest bango mobile analytics tracking tools to the site. These include bgo_campaign parameters etc. and these are passed to the site via the request query parameters. Once any of the 6 valid bango parameters are detected by the site, they are stored in the users session and are appending on all page tracking numbers and all bango relay numbers. Therefore we can track where a user has come from campaign wise, for every bit of content they download, and even when they register.

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…

Similar to the other site we are testing mobile seo on, we did absolutely no Mobile Seo on Mobislim after we managed to boost rankings for all our target terms. After 1 month one of our new target terms “slimming” has improoved conciderably, we are now #24 for “slimming” and we were about 80 a month ago, and we have done absolutely nothing in this time. Ace.  We are also ranking for related slimming terms such as slimming products, and slimming hoodia. (Hoodia is a pooular slimming product).

After our success with Spurs Mobile Animations and on and off page mobile seo, Maria, David, Gaz and I decided to hold off any bloggin and other off page mobile seo for spurs mobile animations. So when I came back 1 month later to have a look and see where we were, well we were still at #1 and #2 for spurs animations and spurs ringtones etc on google mobile search but more interestingly, we were also top slots in normal google websearch. I thought this was most strage since we outranked the official spurs website…

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.

Very interesting. I’ve not checked the spurs animations rankings for a few days and google has dropped us again. I’m therefore wondering if it will suddenly appear again by me blogging about the spurs animations.

OK well after a few days of mobislim.com not even coming up in a google mobile search for “mobislim” it has now appeared as slot 6 on the front page. We are still not ranking for other search terms such as the “radish diet”.

So our site is currently in index limbo. Our old urls, which we’ve 301′d to the new homepage are still in the index, (but presumably not doing very well since they are only linked to the homepage), but our new super amazing mobile seo friendly urls have not been indexed yet. Here’s a link to the main mobile slimming page. And here’s a link to the cold water diet page, which as you can see has been beautifully crafted - now please please please mr google spider - can you crawl mobislim and particularly pick up this fascinating article about the cold water diet?

Last night we deployed mobislim.com v2 - which is now governed by the Scorch Controller. This Java Spring MVC based controller framework ensures that our slimming diets and health site now benefits from SEO friendly urls. In addition to this - page titles and page meta is now based on the asset / article being viewed. We are also using the heading tags when presenting article titles. The combination of the above should lead to a whole load of hot loving from google mobile search.

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…

We had confirmation today from Bango Button that we could upgrade the framework for mobislim.com so that it could utilise our new Scorch Controller (TM). This was also ok’d by the mobislim web mistress and mobislim blog writer - Maria.

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!

Ok So I got up at the crack of dawn to get working on my mobile seo for our animation fc tottenham hotspurs wallpapersm ringtones and animations site .

Ok actually dawn hasn’t happened yet, but what has happened is that we now rank for ‘Spurs Chants Ringtones’. We are on slot 5 on page 1. Interestingly the page leads you striaght into the main spurs page, and not the special spurs-chants-ringtones page we created.

I wonder what other things we can do to boost it’s position. I’m thinking about experimenting with changing the hyphens to underscores… [to be continued].

OK So I managed to get the sitemap picked up by google, and google has crawled the pages. The great news is that we now show up on page 1 of the google search for “mobile animations”. This is brilliant because it is on the web page of google mobile search, which is actually the default page which users see. The bad news is that we wanted it to appear, and were expecting it to appear in the “mobile” results tab. It is still not there. Also I am having problems getting this url to be picked up by google! http://mob.animationfc.mobi/a/spurs/spurs-go-marching-in-ringtone.jsp

Hopefully there will be more news on this soon. But it certainly seems that what google does for mobile (and I guess this isn’t a surprise) is somehow done less frequently or carries less weight than standard web indexing.