Are Tablet Friendly Tools Like OnSwipe Stealing Traffic From your Site?

Did you install anything on your blog to make your site more mobile or tablet friendly? Did you know these tablet friendly tools like OnSwipe could be stealing traffic and page views away from you?

I spent several hours yesterday developing a tutorial explaining how to make your blog tablet friendly, only to discover that these tools, such as OnSwipe and WPTouch were hijacking page views.

And for all I know, creating duplicate content. Yikes!

Maybe you’re okay with someone else stealing your traffic because at least people are reading your content, but the duplicate content thing? That’s a Google penalty.

OnSwipe makes your blog all pretty in a magazine style format but also redirects tablet and mobile devices to their own site to see your content, so you don’t get the page view.

And they don’t tell you that they are doing a redirect. I don’t know about you, but this is something I’d want to know.

The fact that OnSwipe is misleading and sneaky about this whole redirect thing is disturbing. For example, they claim there will be a huge “page view increase”. Yeah, for THEM.  Also, if you use the WordPress plug-in, the browser URL is disguised so that the reader still thinks they are on your site, when in fact, they are not. (And yes, I realize by linking to them, I’m giving them yet another page view).

Maybe they intended this tool for big revenue generating, full-on ad-filled, high-falootin’ online magazines more than us lowly blogs. Maybe I was all starry eyed by the thought of making my blog all tablet friendly without the sidebars and stuff getting in the way of my content. That’s what I get for trying to play with the big boys, I guess.

By the way, you can see this hijacking evidence by looking at your stats. I enabled OnSwipe and visited my site on my tablet and it didn’t show up in StatCounter or Google Analytics. Then I disabled it and visited my site on my tablet and what do you know….it showed up in my stats.

I did the same thing for my mobile friendly tool, WPTouch, and the same thing happened. And this is acceptable why?

I asked OnSwipe about it and haven’t received a response, so what gives?

Here are my two (no wait — three) main gripes to OnSwipe (and anybody who looks and smells like OnSwipe):

• If you are going to redirect page views away from my site onto yours, tell me. And don’t tell me in the fine print. Tell me up front. (This is in case they told me in the fine print.)
• If you do take away my page views, give me some access to a reporting tool THAT I CAN FIND that tells me just how much traffic you are “increasing” for my content.
• Assure your clients that you are not duplicating content which would therefore be penalized by Google.

I tried researching this issue and nobody seems to be talking about this. Am I alone? Or am I just a mutt barking up a pure-bred tree?

Are you concerned about mobile or tablet friendly tools like OnSwipe stealing traffic from your blog? Do you have a better alternative for creating a tablet friendly site? I’d love to hear it.