redirect for smartphones and Googlebot-mobile

I'm building a mobile version of my site for smart-phones (iPhone/Blackberry/Android/WebOS)

and I want to redirect to the mobile version from my main site whenever the user agent is of one of the kinds listed above (my mobile site is on a different url than my Desktop site).

My mobile version is more like a WebApp and does not contain the same content as the Desktop site.

After开发者_开发技巧 reading This Post by Google I understand that the Googlebot expects smartphones to display the Desktop version of the site (Googlebot-Mobile is not used for smartphones)

I'm afraid that if I redirect to the mobile version for smartphones, Google will give me penalty for cloaking, How can I avoid this?

I know that including a link from the main site to the mobile version and vice versa helps a lot. Any other advice/best practices on how to be google friendly when creating mobile versions of the site for smartphones?

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From the article:

For Googlebot and Googlebot-Mobile, it does not matter what the URL structure is as long as it returns exactly what a user sees too.

The key thing is you must be consistent in the content you give to the bot and the one you serve to the user.

Another interesting excerpt from the article:

For now, we expect smartphones to handle desktop experience content so there is no real need for mobile-specific effort from webmasters. However, for many websites it may still make sense for the content to be formatted differently for smartphones, and the decision to do so should be based on how you can best serve your users.

You can also serve a different page/content/styling based on the UA string, as stated in the article:

If you serve all types of content from www.example.com, i.e. serving desktop-optimized content or mobile-optimized content from the same URL depending on the User-agent, this will also lead to correct crawling by Googlebot and Googlebot-Mobile. This is not considered cloaking by Google.

I think it all boils down how different the content/styling is. If it's only slightly different, I would probably go with the same url serving both. If it's dramatically different, I would use a different url for smartphones.

Hope this helps!

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Updating this with current information. Google now crawls with a smartphone Googlebot-Mobile user agent. See: Google blog post

Google's SEO PDF explains how to avoid cloaking penalties. Specifically, see Page 27. See: SEO PDF

The gist is, the content you serve a desktop user can be different from the content you serve a mobile user, as long as Googlebot is always served the same content you serve to any desktop user, and Googlebot-Mobile is always served the same content you serve to any mobile user. To abide by this, it seems to me you should not configure your site to serve mobile content based on finding "Googlebot-Mobile" in the user agent. The bot will supply a typical smartphone user agent string as part of it's own user agent--that's the part to rely on, or else if a new device comes out that you do not yet account for, you'll serve desktop content to it, but mobile content to Googlebot-Mobile impersonating that device.

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You could use subdomain for your mobile site and redirect google mobile bot there together with smartphones