The following set of rewrite rules will redirect all Android, Blackberry, iOS, Windows and WebOS devices to a specific mobile directory on your website. Additionally, it will redirect Google’s mobile crawler – according to Google search spam czar Matt Cutts this is perfectly acceptable and even somewhat encourage.
To implement these rules:
- Replace “mobiledirectoryhere” with the path to your mobile site. If your mobile site is located in a subdirectory, use the full URL (including “http://”) and you can omit the first RewriteCond.
- Then copy & paste the ruleset into the site’s .htaccess file or the main apache configuration.
Rationale
Since the last time I wrote about mobile browser detection and redirection in 2009 the mobile device landscape has changed once again. Smartphones dominate the mobile browsing landscape and feature phones are almost not existant in server logs.
The old redirection rules I posted attempt to redirect every mobile phone under the sun. At this point in 2011, it’s probably safe to completely ignore ancient phones and simplify your Apache rules in the process.
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