googles new "love" for mobile friendly vs user wishes

[jamie]

the highest traffic pages on our site do not lend themselves to mobile layout. the rest of the site is mobile friendly (and is tagged as such in google), but, after trying several ideas and receiving lots of user complaints, we've made an exception for these few popular pages. the pinch and zoom and drag of the phone browser work perfectly for the content of these pages - and furthermore our users want to keep it like that.

i do provide a slimmed down mobile version which is available with a click, but not many people use it.

so... our users want non-mobile but google is giving a ranking boost to mobile friendly. i don't know what to do. google's mantra of "always build for people" seems to backfire on me here ;)

anyone have any suggestions or is in a similar situation?

cheers

[Barbados]

I have to say we're encountering the same issue here. Google are forcing the issue with regards to mobile and not every site needs or wants it.

Quite apart from anything else I've now got clients having conversations with me about having to rebuild their websites, despite them being perfectly usable.

Our response is to 'build for people' as you say and ignore Google. Google will soon realise that there have to be exceptions to the blanket rule and any guesses as to how long before there is something in WMT letting you specify which pages you are not going to upgrade for mobile?

[jamie]

Google will soon realise

hi barbados, i love your optimism ;) i am not sure i can leave it in the hands of the (google) gods though.

am wondering whether to show the mobile version of the page first with a link to the desktop "full" version (as opposed to the other way around which it is at the moment)

[Barbados]

I'm nothing if not optimistic :-)

Like the idea and it's worth a try; I'd be very interested to see how it treats the site in search. Of course a lot depends on how much mobile traffic the site currently gets; if it's 10% then not a problem really.

I still believe however that there will be a backlash over the Google police enforcing mobile compliance. Too much of what is decided is done by people with 4G and 100mb cable connections forgetting of course that there are people who live outside the metropolis....Not everyone is a mobile consumer these days despite what you see and hear...