The question of whether having a separate mobile site (ie a m.yourdomain.com site) with identical content can expose your to a duplicate content penalty is a common concern.

Here’s the main things you need to know.

Start with this video from Matt Cutts:

Which references this Google Webmaster Central blog post.

Here’s the summary:

• Google has different indexes for mobile search versus normal (eg desktop) search
• Thus ensure your mobile site is indexed in mobile search, and normal site indexed in normal index
• Do this by:
  • Creating a mobile sitemap as well as a normal sitemap
  • detecting the user agent, and serving up appropriate site (eg only show mobile content to ‘Googlebot-mobile’ agent)
  • ensure mobile site has correct Doc Type definition

You can also use meta tags and robots.txt to exclude mobile content from non-mobile user agents, but you probably don’t have to go this far, especially if you have the Doc Type set.

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