Mobile Site SEO - Playing Nicely with Google

Question

If I have an iPhone version of my site, what are the things I need to make sure of so it doesn't interfere with SEO?

I've read quite a bit now about cloaking and sneaky javascript redirects, and am wondering how this fits into iPhone and Desktop websites playing together.

If my iPhone site has a totally different layout, where say the Desktop site has a page with 3 posts and 10 images all on the page, and my iPhone site makes that 2 pages, one with the posts, one with the images (trying to think up an example where the structure's decently different), that's probably not best practice for SEO, so should I just tell google not to look at the mobile site? If so, and assuming my client would like to automatically redirect mobile users to the iPhone site (I'm familiar with the id of taking them to the regular page with a link to the mobile version instead), how do I not make this look like cloaking?

Answer 1

Google actually has a separate index and crawler for mobile content. So all you need to do is design your URLs in such a way that you can exclude googlebot from the mobile pages and googlebot-mobile from the regular pages in robots.txt.