Google Emailing Non-Mobile Friendly Sites

[ZydoSEO]

Not sure if anyone here has seen one (first I've heard of it), but Google has emailed a friend of mine basically telling him that his site was a non-responsive site and that as a result it would do poorly in search results for searches performed from mobile devices.

I wonder if emails will go out about HTTPS as well.

Trying to get a copy of the exact email.

[rish3]

how do you resize images that have image maps

If you're open to using jQuery, search google for "jQuery-rwdImageMaps"

[engine]

- Did your traffic (mobile, organic) drop after the email?
- How long after receiving the email did your traffic drop?

No traffic drop, or change.

[lucy24]

Follow-up: I took a closer look at the dot org that they recently emailed about. And the bad news is that, while I can deal with everything else, "content not sized to viewport" will always trip-up the computer that generates these messages. Why? Because one part of this particular site uses a simple javascript scroll that involves a wide div inside a narrower div. If you're a human studying the html you can see what's going on. But if you're a computer scanning for <width> declarations you'll think it's just another site forcing everything to 1200px.

Fortunately nobody ever goes to this site unless they're already looking for it ... but even then, would they stay away if they were on a smartphone and the search engine said Mobile Unfriendly?

[keyplyr]

- Did your traffic (mobile, organic) drop after the email?
- How long after receiving the email did your traffic drop?

No, but I launched the mobile version shortly after receiving the email.

[rish3]

Because one part of this particular site uses a simple javascript scroll that involves a wide div inside a narrower div.

Silly, but you could set the width with javascript, versus directly in css.

[keyplyr]

Another observation: For months Pagespeed and other Google mobile tools gave my mobile responsive site's 300 pages the highest scores: 99s & 100s.

Now it appears to be getting more critical.

Eliminate render-blocking CSS in above-the-fold content

My site loads quickly but I understand what this means. I have combined and minified (compressed) CSS, and I do use in-line CSS as well as put some of it at the bottom of the page - HOWEVER - the *vast* amount of CSS needed to display a large mobile-responsive site across multi-platforms & multi-devices should be called externally. IMO the benefit of browser caching is not being considered.

[ken_b]

Did your traffic (mobile, organic) drop after the email?

No, but.... this might be worth reading:
Starting April 21, we will be expanding our use of mobile-friendliness as a ranking signal. [webmasterworld.com]
.

[lucy24]

And now the good news... I was wrong about one aspect of "Content not sized to viewport".

one part of this particular site uses a simple javascript scroll that involves a wide div inside a narrower div.

A closer look at the offending site reveals that they don't mind about the 1200px scroller at all. (This should be a relief to everyone, since probably half the sites in the world have a similarly coded scrolling banner.) Instead they're complaining that the content width is 400px, pushing some navigation elements off the edge of a 320px viewport.

The bad news is that I cannot for the life of me figure out why they think the content is 400px wide, let alone why they think this makes the navigation unreachable when in fact it just drops down below the other content.

:: shrug ::

[EditorialGuy]

The bad news is that I cannot for the life of me figure out why they think the content is 400px wide, let alone why they think this makes the navigation unreachable when in fact it just drops down below the other content.

It's early days yet. With Google, most new things are like public beta tests.

[Kratos]

Have any of you who received the non mobile friendly email gone on to have Google acknowledge your site as mobile friendly?

From what I am seeing Google takes ages to acknowledge that a site is now mobile friendly. I changed one of our blogs to mobile friendly in the second week of January and we're still waiting for Google to remove the non mobile friendly message. When we test the website with the Google mobile friendly test, it scores 100/100 and the changes have been minimal.

So any of you have gotten the non mobile friendly message removed from your WMT and some kind of message in WMT acknowledging that your site is now mobile friendly?

[keyplyr]

From what I am seeing Google takes ages to acknowledge that a site is now mobile friendly.

Just took a few days for my site, but page by page.

After I relaunched my desktop site as mobile-responsive, I updated dates in sitemap.xml and resubmitted to GWT. After a few days I started seeing the "mobile friendly" (or whatever the exact wording is) on a couple of pages in mobile SERP. These steadily increased.

In GWT > Search Traffic > Mobile Usability it took several weeks for all 300 pages to loose the "non-mobile-friendly" error (or whatever the exact wording is.)

To help SEs & humans get fresh pages, I removed Cache-Control site-wide 30 days prior to launch, then reinstalled after most pages were re-indexed as mobile friendly.

[Kratos]

Thanks keyplyr. So you noticed the mobile friendly label on the SERPS upon mere days of making your site mobile responsive, but it took several weeks for all pages to lose the non mobile friendly errors in WMT like "configure view port" etc, right?

I haven't checked the mobile SERPs for our site, but I take it from your post that Google acknowledges the mobile friendliness per page and updates it on the SERPs but will not acknowledge all pages as mobile friendly on WMT until it finishes going through all pages reported as non mobile friendly.

We have a few more pages than yours to go through but I find it rare that Google takes so long if in your case it only took a couple of weeks. Let's hope and see. Fetch as Google hasn't been working for the last 2 days too, I'm guessing everyone is beating the hell out of Fetch as Google crawling their sites after the announcement on the 27th.

[keyplyr]

...Google acknowledges the mobile friendliness per page and updates it on the SERPs but will not acknowledge all pages as mobile friendly on WMT until it finishes going through all pages reported as non mobile friendly.

Kratos - Page by page also in WMT.

[Kendo]

The font size that they recommend is almost twice the size of what most of us are using in well-designed web sites. While it may be good for visually impaired people, even they have the know-how to zoom for larger fonts.

Wouldn't it be better if they made their amusement devices (phones) to read the web as every one else sees it?

If I follow their guidelines I end with with a sick badly designed website that looks like it was built by a first-timer.

[keyplyr]

The font size that they recommend is almost twice the size of what most of us are using in well-designed web sites.

You're not comparing the resolution between desktop & mobile are you?

[timchuma]

I have thousands of pages on my website that supposedly fail. If I tried to update them all I would never have time to get anything else done. Google Adsense never performed that well on photo gallery sites any way (they were auto-generated pages and then uploaded manually.)

[lucy24]

The font size that they recommend is almost twice the size of what most of us are using in well-designed web sites.

This is a new definition of "well-designed" that I was not previously familiar with. So good design requires forcing all text to nine points instead of leaving text size up to the user's preference? I thought it was just an annoying feature of all too many current sites.

While it may be good for visually impaired people, even they have the know-how to zoom for larger fonts.

Oh, thank you. I'm honored. Even visually impaired people have brains and know how to use their browsers? Better than the average user, probably. And even visually impaired people know that, given the choice between the site designer's whim and the ability to read an entire text block without having to zoom and scroll repeatedly, the designer's whim must obviously take precedence?

Have I got that right?

If I tried to update them all

For Heaven's sake, you don't need to update each individual page. Well, except for the viewport meta; that has to go on every page if you don't use a shared header file. Everything else is just a few stylesheet tweaks.

[Kendo]

Everything else is just a few stylesheet tweaks.

Seemingly the simpletons at Google might agree with you.

Try this... create a test page using only 2 short lines of text, setting one to 16px which is recommended for lame phones, and the other at 10pt which is what we use on one info site.

See the difference?

Then realise that the menus and side indexes are limited to a commonly used width (one that suits Google ads). Now if those indexes use 16px it gets real ugly.

And if the horizontal menu across the top of our page used 16px we would need a wider page.

What also happens when using this wondrous size for lame phones is that layout gets trashed throughout the site, everywhere the message has been optimised for one line such as headings that will now be wrapped into one a bit lines.

Any more naive comments to support this idiocy?

[netmeg]

(lucy24, I don't think we're the target demographic here)

Kendo, it sounds like you're not keen on your site being viewed on mobile anyway, and this is mainly supposed to affect mobile search. So I'm not sure why you're being quite so hostile.

[IanCP]

NEWS! NEWS!

I'm no longer left out.

I received an email this morning [Sydney time].

Yeah right.

I can not fathom why any person would seek out a very technical site on mobile/tablet except:

a) To clarify a point in an argument - pub argument?

OR;

b) To cheat in an exam.

Take you pick. From 18 years of feedback, most people print my pages out.

Then again, mobile/tablet people of today's generation might be geniuses compared to my generation.

Personally, I don't think you are anywhere near as smart as you think you are. Especially when your 73 year old Grand-Dad is still technically ahead of the game.

[lucy24]

I can not fathom why

I've got these notices for both my personal site and my art studio's site, each of which can go days without a human visit.

But I had to scratch the "alphabetical order" hypothesis, because the sequence to date is
fzzz.com
azzz.org
lzzz.com