Google Wants You to Go Mobile, Here’s How

Google Wants You to Go Mobile, Here’s How

Google changes its algorithm more than once a day, so why is Google’s upcoming prioritization of mobile-friendly websites such a big deal? Well, Google will rank your page lower on search results if your desktop site has a webpage that is not optimized for a mobile experience.The truth is, mobile traffic makes up for nearly half of all traffic for Google. Imagine, if you fail to meet Google’s new mobility requirements, you’re at risk of loosing all that traffic.

Companies that maintain separate desktop and mobile websites, come April 21, will be SOL. But it looks like this may be the case as studies show that many companies have a ways to go before they are compliant with Google’s new ranking system. In a recent article, only 9 percent of the top 100 e-tail sites use responsive design while 59 percent use a dedicate mobile site.This doesn't mean they aren't compliant with Google's new recommendations. The problem with separating your mobile site and your desktop site comes down to parity of experience. Maintaining a streamlined user experience between the two different architectures and screen flows can be difficult. This will force many of these companies to make some tough decisions, fundamentally change their multichannel experience on the web by using frameworks that create consistent page flows for both the desktop and mobile channels or adopt responsive design across their channels.

My Recommendations

Google is pushing a lot of recommendations that are tailored to a responsive experience, but it doesn’t mean you can’t have a separate mobile site. In many cases, companies have invested heavily in desktop web designs and created separate mobile experiences as they move into the mobile space.

• Create regression test that identify common problems, such as bad cross links and mobile 404’s. Web testing tools, such as selenium can quickly identify bad links or other changes that to the site that is not easily caught using manual testing.
• Update your mobile web standards to minimize the use of bad interstitials and identify coding standards for handling faulty redirects, mobile 404’s and other problems identified by Google.
• Adjust your robots.txt to exclude specific areas of your site that may not include an equivalent mobile experience until a mobile experience can be developed if this data not key to the site. If the pages are important, link to the desktop experience from the mobile experience instead of creating a mobile 404.
• Many companies are slow to adopt modern web browsers and require IT to support outdated browsers as part of their corporate standard. If your company needs to support older desktop browsers, such as IE8, that don’t support HTML5 video tags, use browser detection to offer these browsers an alternate playback method such as flash or an embedded media player compatible with the corporate standard browser.
• Review your mobile strategy to ensure that your mobile approach is still cost effective based on the changes to Google’s rating system. It may be time to start using multichannel tools that create an adaptive approach that covers all your channels or adopt responsive design.

Google Recommendations

Whether you use responsive design, a dedicated mobile site or a multichannel web architecture, Google has outlined a series of common mistakes made by mobile websites. These mistakes are available in a recent article posted by Google,”Avoiding Common Mistakes”. Google’s recommendations center on equivalency between the desktop and mobile experience.

Blocked JavaScript, CSS and Image Files

When Googlebot inspects a page, it wants to load the page as an end user would see it. This means that Googlebot needs to download all the resources on the page, just like an end user would. If your page has blocked resources, you search ratings will go down. Fortunately, Google provides the Google WebMaster Tools to help developers find and fix the problems.

First Google suggest testing your robots.txt file for errors using the robots testing tool. Secondly, Google recommends using “Fetch as Google” and the “Mobile Friendly Test” on each page to find any blocked resources. I ran the mobile friendly test on my own website. The example below is from the Mobile Friendly Test identifying four blocked resources on my site I need to fix.

Unplayable Content

Video and audio should play on both desktop and mobile experiences. There are still a large number of sites that use flash to render video or other streaming tools that are incompatible with mobile devices. A solution is to use HTML5 to embed your video into your website or leverage embedded players that are compatible with mobile devices as well as desktops

Faulty Redirects

Google defines a faulty redirect as a desktop URL that does not redirect the user to an equivalent mobile page to if they are using a mobile device. A common cause of this problem are pages that require a complex number of URL parameters in the desktop experience, and the functionality is not duplicated on the mobile page. This is common for search pages that pass parameters on the URL. In other cases, users are simply sent a sites homepage if the experience does not exist. If your using a site that delivers a multichannel experience, such as responsive web design, then you’re good to go. If, not you need to take special care that you are creating an equivalent experience on the mobile site. If you can’t, redirect the user to the desktop page instead.

Mobile Only 404s

Google clearly defines that a mobile site should not throw a 404 error if a page exists on the desktop, but it does not exist on the mobile site. Google recommends sending the user to the desktop experience if the page does not exist. For a responsive site, the rule is automatically enforced, and if configured, Google Webmaster Tools will send you notifications if mobile 404 errors occur. You can review these errors in the crawl errors report in the Smartphone tab.

 App Download Interstitials

 Interstitials are the pop ups of the mobile world, and Google isn’t a big fan of promoting your mobile application in a pop up that encumbers the users view. The image below is from Google’s website, and its a great example of one of these annoying pop ups.

Google recommends creating a header banner in in line banner that allows the user to use the website without having to take that extra click to close the blocking page.

 Irrelevant Cross-links

Many mobile sites have links that point back to the optimize-desktop experience and vice versa. This allows the end user to easily switch between mobile and desktop optimized experiences. Google recommends that if you cross-link your desktop and mobile experience, you link to equivalent pages. Don’t send the user to the home page or some other page that doesn’t present a similar experience.

 Slow Mobile Pages

Whether it’s a desktop experience or a mobile experience, no one wants a slow page load. Mobile users are especially turned off by slow page loads. The good news is that Google provides a great tool for testing mobile and desktop load times. Below is a page speed example using Google’s own home page. 

Like many of Google’s tools PageSpeed Insights assists developers by providing recommendations when a page fails a particular speed test rule. I also recommendYslow as a great browser based tool for finding page load problems on your sight.