Google To Expand Mobile Friendliness As A Ranking Signal

[travelin cat]

The time to make sure your site is mobile friendly is approaching!

Starting April 21, we will be expanding our use of mobile-friendliness as a ranking signal. This change will affect mobile searches in all languages worldwide and will have a significant impact in our search results. Consequently, users will find it easier to get relevant, high quality search results that are optimized for their devices.

[googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com...]

[samwest]

For once this blind squirrel finds a nut. I did a plain voice search on my smart phone for my widgets and I'm not only listed as mobile friendly but also the number one result. Very few of my competitors are making this change.

[webcentric]

We live in a mobile world. If this news is rocking your world, well, wake up and smell the now-stale coffee please.

One thing I see a lot of is related to advertising on supposedly mobile friendly websites e.g. the site scales to the smaller viewport sizes in every way except the 728 x 90 banner at the top of the page which hangs out over the edge into space. People seem to be OK with going mobile but not OK with writing a little jQuery to get their ads right for all devices. Adsense users who refuse to use responsive ads because of some sort of superstition fall into this category as well.

I believe this is one reason a great many webmasters have avoided responsive design up to now but I also think it's something everyone who wants to survive needs to solve. It's not that difficult once you put your mind to it.

For the record, I don't care what Google is planning any more. I'm simply concerned with how my sites serve my users. If Google or Bing or Yahoo or whoever wants to sent me traffic, I won't complain but I'm done crying about it when they don't. Frankly, it's a liberating frame of mind and I'm finding that lost Google traffic can be replaced (even if it does take a great deal of effort). The question is and has always been, how do you get the best results from the traffic you're getting. If you haven't built something to wow the mobile user yet, then you're most certainly missing out in some way.

[EditorialGuy]

A good responsive design can make a 3000 word article usable on a lot of devices. You can use tabs or an accordion to hide the bulk of the text and show it one heading at a time.

As long as the text fits the width of the streen, you're fine--up to a point. The main problem with using responsive design for longer text is paragraph length. A
paragraph that looks fine on, say, a printed page of THE NEW YORKER or in the Web edition of THE NEW YORK TIMES can look massive on a small smartphone screen. That's one of the reasons why I went with separate mobile pages, as opposed to responsive pages, for our main site: On the mobile pages, I've broken the text into smaller paragraphs (something that can be done properly only with hand editing). This is easy enough to do for a few hundred pages of mostly static content ("evergreen" pages that need updating only now and then), although it obviously isn't practical for a site that's spitting out new pages all the time.

We have a secondary site that does use responsive design. It was designed first and foremost for mobile, and it works perfectly on a smartphone screen. On a desktop, the shorter paragraphs give it the look of a King James Bible page. The pages are "mobile-friendly," but I wouldn't call the "desktop-friendly," even though the site attracts far more mobile desktop users than it does mobile users.

[Dymero]

If you're worried about a 3,000 word article on a mobile site, maybe now's the time to also consider paginating your articles. This is the kind of situation pagination was designed for, to break up long articles into digestible chunks.

Personally, I have no problem reading long articles on my mobile phone. I did at one time almost always go to my desktop to read longer articles, but increasingly I've stayed at my phone.

As for conversions, I think the move to mobile ought to be a boon to services like Google Wallet and Paypal (don't know if Apple Pay can be used to pay on websites like Wallet and Paypal). If enough websites adopt these kinds of services, and if users adopt them, too, that will significantly simplify the checkout process.

[ecommerceprofit]

Made site mobile friendly 2 days ago and ad Conversions horrible now I am stuck between losing ranking and ads not working

[webcentric]

"Made site mobile friendly 2 days ago and ad Conversions horrible now I am stuck between losing ranking and ads not working"

Rome wasn't built in a day. Depending on how drastic your changes, you're probably gonna have to tweak things a bit. Did your site change drastically on desktop? I'm guessing that's where conversions are suffering.

[dannyboy]

Made site mobile friendly 2 days ago and ad Conversions horrible now I am stuck between losing ranking and ads not working

Your conversions are bad on the mobile version or desktop? Is it a responsive design or a separate mobile version of the site? Are you comparing apples to oranges regarding banner sizes? I mean, are you saying the 728x90 desktop ad converted well, but the smaller, mobile 300x50 performed worse? How are you serving different ads to different screen sizes?

[chrisv1963]

The pages are "mobile-friendly," but I wouldn't call the "desktop-friendly," even though the site attracts far more mobile desktop users than it does mobile users.

I wonder what the effect of Panda will be on all these changes. Some people might make their pages "mobile friendly" and forget about the "desktop friendliness" and get hurt by Panda. I think that the best move might be a separate mobile site, with the necessary measures to avoid duplicate content penalties.

[ecommerceprofit]

I forgot to clarify - the mobile conversions are the only conversions suffering. The desktop conversions are fine. The desktop site did not change. I use a well known shopping cart - they have a button that when pressed makes a mobile friendly site. When customers visit the site on a mobile phone the site looks different so I think it's detected automatically when a mobile customer visits.

[Rasputin]

Re separate site vs resposive design, google are clear on what they think is best approach

Mistake 2 - Implementing the mobile site on a different domain, subdomain, or subdirectory from the desktop site.

[developers.google.com...]

[netmeg]

Are you talking about ad clicks or ecommerce conversions (sales) ? I am unclear by what you wrote.

Either way - two days is not long enough to judge the effect.

[rish3]

I forgot to clarify - the mobile conversions are the only conversions suffering.

We noticed this as well when we switched to responsive. Some of the things we did that helped:

Added touch support. This will vary depending on your site, but we ended up using jquery-ui-touch-punch

A lot of time tweaking padding on buttons, line spacing, etc, so that "clicking" with a finger was easier. Bigger buttons, more space between clickable elements, etc.

Making sure all forms were as mobile friendly as possible. For example, using as much width as possible for text entries, more spacing between radio buttons. And, using the new HTML5 input types, like 'tel' for telephone numbers, to make form entry easier. The 'tel' input lets them input a telephone number with a telephone keypad, versus the full keyboard.

Hiding things like the search form, navigation,etc behind labeled buttons at the top. This brought the actual content closer to the top of the page.

The thing that helped the most was a little unexpected. There's a notable number of people that just don't want the mobile formatted site. We used a bit of javascript to create a "view desktop site" button. It deletes the content attribute of the viewport tag and sets a cookie to do that on subsequent page views. That allows the mobile device to just view the desktop version of the site. We also added a bit of code to support the "view desktop" function in the native android browser.

Edit: Oh, and get an account at browshot or similar, so you can see screenshots of your site on a variety of mobile phones. We ended up tweaking a lot of css as we noticed oddness on certain models.

[EditorialGuy]

Re separate site vs resposive design, google are clear on what they think is best approach

They don't say that one is preferred over the other in terms of ranking, though.

They merely point out that responsive is result in mistakes by the site designer, saves on crawling resources, etc.

[keyplyr]

Just a FYI about the Pagespeed tool. IMO this, and other tools offered by Google are a great help, but not 100% accurate, as exemplified below. One of my pages is being demoted 1% because Google's own Adsense tap target is too close to the next tap target responsive ad in the rotation (controlled by Google.) I have no other tap targets anywhere near this ad.

99/100 User Experience
Consider Fixing:
Size tap targets appropriately
Some of the links/buttons on your webpage may be too small for a user to easily tap on a touchscreen. Consider making these tap targets larger to provide a better user experience.
The following tap targets are close to other nearby tap targets and may need additional spacing around them. The

The tap target <div id="abgc">AdChoices</div> is close to 1 other tap targets.

[ecommerceprofit]

netmeg - I'm talking about customer clicking on ad and then the click converting into a sale. Today was the same - bad...not the end of the World and more data is needed for sure but it's looking like this change is hurting our mobile ad conversions...for some reason though our overall sales and overall non ad conversions are up...good info. from everyone...

[ecommerceprofit]

I just checked - our site does not use a responsive design - looks like I need to fix that...

[graeme_p]

People can, and do, read large amounts of text on fairly small mobile devices: I know people who read books on phones.

This may be difficult with the smallest phones, but people who visit a website with those will be looking for brief text - a different audience. Conversely, shorter text will not satisfy those looking for something like the longer.

[Tonearm]

I just spent a few hours trying to figure out how to comply with this without completely redesigning my site but I don't see how it could be done. I guess I have a ranking penalization to look forward to.

What's wrong with zooming anyway? I think zooming is great.

[Dymero]

Putting Google aside, webmasters should be responding to changes in how their websites are accessed, and more and more users are accessing websites via mobile. It'll definitely take work to make the website function multi-device, but I think it'll will be worth it (speaking as someone who has some significant work to do on making his website mobile-friendly).

I'm personally less inclined to use a website where I have to zoom and scroll. I just want to access the content right away.

[lucy24]

What's wrong with zooming anyway?

Seriously? The average user sees nothing wrong with being forced to choose between seeing the full width of a page-- or even the full width of a single text block-- and being able to read its content?

News to me.

One of my pages is being demoted 1% because Google's own Adsense tap target ...

ROFL. I knew it could only be a matter of time!

1% doesn't matter, though. If you look at the PageSpeed results for different pages, you'll see that the "Something bad may happen" cutoff is somewhere around 70%. ("This page may not pass Google's Mobile-Friendly Test [google.com].") I don't know if there's a lower cutoff where they say flatly "This page will not pass", because even my most egregious archival pages don't come in below 67%-- meaning, I guess, that you really have to try to get a still-lower score. But the "may not pass" seems to be a pretty accurate predictor, based on the URLs I tried.

[EditorialGuy]

I just spent a few hours trying to figure out how to comply with this without completely redesigning my site but I don't see how it could be done. I guess I have a ranking penalization to look forward to.

A ranking change, maybe. Or maybe not, depending on the mobile-friendliness (or the lack thereof) of the pages that you're competing against in the SERPs.

Also, the real-world impact of lower rankings in mobile search will depend on how much revenue you're earning (or can realistically hope to earn) from mobile search traffic. We created mobile-friendly versions of our most popular pages two years ago, and the good news is that traffic on those pages has grown three times as fast as our desktop traffic over the past year. The bad news is that our mobile-friendly pages are earning very little revenue, compared to their desktop counterparts. There may be a "best practices" case to be made for mobile-friendliness, but whether mobile-friendliness and high mobile-search rankings are essential for your business probably depends on your topic and your audience.

[flatfile]

What's wrong with zooming anyway?

The thing with zoomed content is that you are often forced to scroll both horizontally and vertically. I hate horizontal scrolling!. Take Webmasterworld posts for an example. I can zoom in to the posts and read just fine, but if I want to see the name of the person who posted the message then I have to scroll sideways.

[Tonearm]

Here's the thing about it for me. I'm an online retailer so I crave conversion rates. I've been at this a long time and my site has been painstakingly optimized to convert as well as possible. So if I don't set a meta viewport, mobile devices display the entire page exactly as intended and exactly as it appears on the desktop. That means high conversion rates. If I brew up a thinned-out version of the page with less navigation and fewer thumbnails per row, it will convert lower for sure. I could include a "View Full Site" link at the bottom of each page but conversions are about giving the user the goods right in their face. Subjective "usability" pales in comparison to conversions and here I'm being forced to sacrifice conversions for Google traffic.

If I go to amazon.com on my phone, I see zero full product photos and 3 partial product photos without scrolling. If I click the "Amazon.com Full Site" link at the bottom, I see 12 full product photos and 3 partials without scrolling.

[keyplyr]

If I open a site on my mobile phone and I need to scroll to view the full width of the page, I leave immediately. I'll then likely open the next page in the SERP.

I have 2 affiliates who have not rebuilt for mobile. I have seen conversions drop steadily over the last 2 years. I have notified both of them that I will change to new affiliates by this coming holiday season if they do not support mobile users by then.

Conversions from affiliates who do support mobile are doing great and both of us have benefited from my pages being mobile responsive. By supporting mobile, my visitors now stick on my site longer, view more pages and click-through ads & product links at an increasing rate.

[Tonearm]

I "support mobile" too. In fact I went to great pains to be sure my site looked and behaved identically across desktop and mobile browsers. Now I'm effectively being required to maintain 2 versions of my site instead of 1 version that works everywhere.

If I open a site on my mobile phone and I need to scroll to view the full width of the page, I leave immediately.

Me too. That's why I don't want to set a meta viewport. As long as I don't set one, the page fits the browser window perfectly every time. No horizontal scrolling needed. But not setting one means I fail Google's mobile-friendliness test.

[EditorialGuy]

I have 2 affiliates who have not rebuilt for mobile. I have seen conversions drop steadily over the last 2 years. I have notified both of them that I will change to new affiliates by this coming holiday season if they do not support mobile users by then.

The flip side can be a problem, too: Our secondary information site is fully responsive, but the primary affiliate partner on our main site--a huge company, by the way--has separate desktop and mobile landing pages. So, for the responsive site, we use a backup affiliate program from a vendor that has responsive landing pages.

[chrisv1963]

What, exactly, is the "definition" of mobile that google uses? I'm curious if Google will go by the viewport of the device being used to consider if it should show mobile sites higher in ranking or if they'll go by the actual device being used?

User behavior/stats should also be an element in the mobile algo. If it appears that mobile visitors are happy when visiting a certain non-mobile site and view several pages instead of bouncing back immediately, then there is no reason for Google to give this site lower rankings. Also if a non-mobile site seems to have a better user behavior (number of pages viewed, time on site, return visits, ...) than a similar mobile optimized site in the same niche, then Google should still give the non-mobile site a better ranking.

What I'm trying to say is that some mobile-optimized sites give a terrible user experience and sometimes the non-mobile sites are still better for the user.

[lucy24]

Overdue question: Right now, if you do a google search using a smartphone or similar, do you get some kind of indication on the SERP about mobile-friendliness? I have to ask this because -- again right-now-as-searches-currently-operate -- I don't see anything special when I search using the Google app on the iPad. (It's different from the iPhone version.) And I doubt it's because, in all the searches I've done in recent weeks, I've never once searched for something whose hits included even a single mobile-friendly site.

I'm not asking about ranking of results. That comes later. Just information, of any kind, anywhere.

[Nutterum]

OK. It is completed. 100% user experience on our new mobile version of the website. Still some tweaks to be made but I`m pretty much ready for the update. Now the question is, how to make Google re-crawl my new mobile friendly code. Any ideas?

[Nutterum]

I am sorry for the double post but I wanted to answer @lucy24 question.

Yes I have seen mobile-friendly indicator signals on my transformer 2 pad (running windows 8 on it) . Under the url I have seen green mobile phone icon several times but more recently a message saying "this website is mobile friendly /not mobile friendly" . I might be in one of Google test groups but it is what I see for 30%(or more) of my searches on the pad. On my iphone I have seen this message once only.