[SEO] Mobile version of a website
 

Website with 50,000 pages indexed in Google.

a) is it ok to have a mobile version of the site at something like m.domain.com, which is not based on content of domain.com. Will it rank, will it work with Google and other search engine sites? Or,

b) would it be better to have a responsive design, and serve exactly the same content to desktop, tablet, and mobile?

How does it work, does it make a difference, as far as search engine traffic to the site?

Thanks.

We're in the dark because we don't know your domain but I guess the answer partly depends on the functionality of your website in a desktop vs smartphone.

I work with websites that are 100% responsive, I work with websites that are text heavy and redirect mobiles to slimmed down pages with a contact us and callback and I"ve worked with Flash sites that have 600 pages of games on the www site but only 40 games on the dot mobile sub-domain because there are only 40 games available for mobile.

Which cat do you fall into?

A lot of pages that are meant to rank for local keywords, with a sign up form (all of them). Goal - get people to sign up.

We're still in the dark to make an informed decision but it sounds like you can do one of these two depending on your budget. Top prize and recommended by Goog in your circumstances is to make you site responsive. The transition should be seamless though and not involve creating a new URL structure, bloated cose etc.

On a tighter budget you can copy everything across to a mobile sub-domain (I wouldn't bother with a .mobi extension in 2015) and have a very basic CSS with viewports, 140% font-size, make sure touch points aren't too close etc. Five years ago you might have been penalised for doing that but not these days but if you want to be 100% safe you can read up here.

Of course you want a mobile version

Google looks for you to have the same content on both web and mobile.
Basically google wants a user to see the same content on a site no matter how the user accesses the site...

Actually, you want a site that changes to fit the various devices. It's 2015.

Subdomain = you need separate linkbuilding fir it to get authority, the authority of your domain won’t help your subdomain. m.domain.com is a subdomain.

A folder (domain.com/mobile/) let's your domain's authority and trust influence the ranking of it.

Just some basics

Option b is the best solution in this day and age. At least if you ask Google :)

You can either use a m.domain.com separate site (but it needs to have the same urls as the desktop one with a canonical link between them, see this: https://developers.google.com/webmas...ate-urls?hl=en) or a responsive design. If you want to be able to control the ads easier based on the device the visitor is using, i recommend the first method.