SEO By the Sea posted about a few patents where various patents have been filed about how to recast a web page to make it viewable on small screens like pda's, cell phones, etc.
It's an interesting read and I recommend that you check it out. What concerns me more than the fact that they're making the content of web sites usable on these small screens is the fact that they may programatically determine the following:
1. Should the content be displayed at all? If it's a footer, it might be considered irrelevant and not necessary to display. What happens to it? It's possible that it may be left out.
2. What if the order of items on your page is important? You'll have no control of that if a program decides to change that for 'better' viewing.
3. The worst thing, in my opinion, though is if you've spent a lot of time and research on what areas of the screen get higher click through rates for your ads, products, etc.
Item 3 is what concerns me the most. Obviously, the search engines and other companies that use the patents to work over your pages are intending to make the pages more viewable and perhaps more traffic to them as a result.
But if you really want the best of both worlds, I think you'll soon find that you have to add another task to your duties - make sure your site displays well on browsers for desktops as well as pda's and cell phones.
BTW, I don't really think the search engines would intentionally obliterate your content.
At least right now this is not very important. So very few people use cell phones to surf the web.
I just wrote an article about the need for handheld support on various blogs.
Interesting questions, G-Man.
I do think that it's smart to try to add a mobile style sheet to the pages of your site, but I think that search engines will still try to divide pages into smaller pieces for handhelds, which may be something that we can't control.
Optimizing pages for smaller screens may mean more than having a style sheet though, especially if the phone system provides a proxy service that does things like rewrite navigation.
I know that we're planning to launch the new SEOmoz site with a mobile style sheet (CSS) to allow for readers on those devices to easily access the site. Since I do so frequently myself (via my "q" on Verizon's EVDO network), we thought it would be a postitive for all our readers.
Masters of Wordpress would be smart to use the following PDA plugin: https://www.webmaster404.com/wordpress-pda-plu...
I just see it as a competitive webmastering thing, if you want more traffic/then optimize for multiple devices.
It's just smart marketing forget about search engines.
This is a very interesting point. I recently viewed my pages on a cell phone and saw that it tried to put in most of my graphics and due to the size limitations it fell sort of short.
So do you think its a good idea to run a special section on a web site just for cell phone users? I know in Dreamweaver you can set the pages for cell phone media. But the pages seem to have no size restrictions. They are just as big as other HTML pages and do not appear to be in any kind of format.
I know Flash has set sizes for cell phone media. Any clues on how to proceed?
Let me add one scenario (#4): If engines know what's relevant or not on your site in relation to the users query, why not show that info right away in the search description? No need sending them off to our sites if they can keep the user themselves.
With improved descriptions they are walking a very fine line.