Why a dotMobi domain makes sense for SEO

Here’s why:

Building a mobile site on a dotMobi domain gives it instant recognizability and ‘findability’ to humans and search crawlers alike. Unlike other mobile domain conventions – such as ‘m.yourbrand.com’ or ‘yourbrand.com/mobile’ – the URL string ‘yourbrand.mobi’ makes your property instantly recognizable as fit for purpose, and differentiated from your separate yourbrand.com content experience. The value of this instant recognition is powerful when set in the context of the mobile user and search engine behaviors discussed above. Your quest is to stand out from the pack as mobile through and through – why leave anything to the imagination of a crawler when it arrives at your mobile site or a user when she’s presented with a bunch of confusing domain strings on a mobile search results page?

Building a dotMobi site means that your URL will automatically feature on the ‘zone files’ that we maintain for ICANN (the meta-Internet registry organization), and which are regularly requested by mobile search engines, directories and other sites and services as ‘seed lists’ for the indexing of mobile-centric web sites (in much the same way as they use DMOZ). In other words, the use of a dotMobi domain will automate the beginnings of your search engine and web directory submission process – in fact each month these log files are requested by around 5,000 interested parties.

The use of a dotMobi domain will help you to keep your URL strings concise and tidy, which in turn will help with user accessibility and usability. Whilst this might seem a trivial point, in practice it can be profound. As already mentioned, the average search query is 15 characters long, but takes roughly 30 key presses and approximately 40 seconds to enter. People are pre-programmed to cut corners and reduce the effort when it comes to text entry on a phone. Making your domains as short as possible is infinitely desirable in this context. And so ‘yourbrand.mobi’ (14 characters) has an important competitive edge over both ‘yourbrand.com/mobile’ (21 characters – or 33% more effort) and ‘m.yourbrand.com’ (15 characters).

The use of a dotMobi domain ensures that best practice coding standards are built in at source. In fact, we make many of the key implementation guidelines found in the W3C’s MobileOK specification a mandatory requirement for using a dotMobi domain. We outlaw the non-compliant stuff like the use of frames, and request that your content validates in xHTML and renders without the use of ‘www’- or we simply won’t allow you to publish your site using the dotMobi domain. In practice this means that we can assure search engines and users that dotMobi sites are built to a certain mobile-centric standard, which is something that other mobile domain conventions can never provide. As such, we’re making dotMobi a hallmark for the mobile internet – which over time will underscore all of the findability, usability and accessibility benefits mentioned above.

Last but not least, our world class development team here in Dublin has put together what we think of as