Changes in rankings of smartphone search results

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com.br/2013/06/changes-in-rankings-of-smartphone_11.html

by huskyr • 13 years ago

293 90 13 years ago

googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com.br

lignuist• 13 years ago

Finally. This is such an annoying behavior. I wouldn't complain about a small info bubble, but assuming that all visitors comming from a search engine want to install an app before they even know the site is simply ridiculous.

hayksaakian• 13 years ago

Thank god. If I'm on Google search, I want a proper web site.

ars• 13 years ago

Headline is inaccurate - they don't downrank for redirects. They downrank for redirects to the mobile homepage instead of the mobile specific page.

I didn't see anything in there about app banners.

(In case it's changed the headline currently says: "Google downranks sites that do mobile redirects / app banners".)

huskyr• 13 years ago

Thanks, i've changed the headline.

danmaz74• 13 years ago

To make it even clearer you could add an always: "... that always redirect...". How it is now it's still pretty cryptic :)

WickyNilliams• 13 years ago

Originally the article (at least when i read earlier today) did contain advice about app popups etc

EDIT: seems it was a different, but very similar article - https://developers.google.com/webmasters/smartphone-sites/co...

bru• 13 years ago

Finally. Websites in the tech sphere are usually mobile friendly (because they live on the edge of modernity or because they are bare bones and content-centric), but "common" websites often offer a poor mobile experience. Google penalising this is good news for the consumer.

However one point that is not addressed in the article: what about websites that make you go through a first page/pop-up which proposes you to download their app every time[1]? That is an annoying behaviour that I'd like to see penalised as well.

And as usual there is a relevant XKCD comic: http://xkcd.com/869/

[1] here, in France, most newspapers websites do this. Main result is that I do not read news on my phone any more - not a big loss actually.

lostlogin• 13 years ago

If only they also down ranked site with total POS mobile sites. Extremely low res graphics, minimal information, massive text. I'm not blind. I'm not half brain dead. I'm just on a phone - your standard site is fine. Have a look at https://touch.trademe.co.nz/

pyre2• 13 years ago

Standard sites aren't always fine. For example, sites where the UI relies on mouse hovering.

InclinedPlane• 13 years ago

There's actually two relevant xkcd comics, here's the second: http://xkcd.com/1174/

tocomment3• 13 years ago

By the way, I could never figure out how some sites disable zoom on the iphone? Anyone know?

(I'd love to write a bookmarklet to re-enable zoom)

slacka2• 13 years ago

I actually prefer the mobile versions that let you set font size on mobile. For example, when zoomed out in HN comments to a level where I don't need to scroll horizontally, the text is impossible to read on low DPI devices like my 3GS. HN would benefit from this. But I hate not being able to zoom. Perfect example, wikipedia. If sites offered a version like the iOS Safari reader gives you, they would be a plus. Unfortunately, most get it wrong.

bad_user• 13 years ago

Oh, how much I hate websites that invite me to download their stupid app. And to add insult to injury, whenever I tried installing their stupid apps, it's usually just a glorified, broken and slow embedded browser.

I also hate websites that give me a commercial that I have to skip to get to the actual content. The invitation for downloading their stupid app is just a use-case for such commercials.

Google should penalize all websites that do this and I would love them for doing it.

untog3• 13 years ago

You want Google to penalise web sites that push ads aggressively?

Right.

inportb• 13 years ago

A kinda-sorta related situation involves forum clients -- multiple different websites offer alerts pointing to the same app, and having to click through the same alert for each website could be somewhat annoying. I'm not sure if this could be detected, though. Perhaps I'm just tired of smackachat alerts.

pyre2• 13 years ago

That's just a result of each forum opting in to using that as their 'native app.' It's annoying that it's the same app every time, but would it be better of all of these forums each had a completely different app they prompted you about?

mattmanser2• 13 years ago

What? Google are dictating your technology solution here and penalising you if you don't do exactly what they want.

This is bad news for consumers and web masters alike and they're dressing it up as if it's the developers fault when a separate site is a perfectly reasonable solution.

That some sites are still struggling to deliver a good mobile solution is irrelevant and a red herring.

It's not Google's job to dictate our solutions. Do you not remember their rubbish hashbang solution?

DanBC• 13 years ago

I am very critical of Google's algorithm and people's SEO, because of the huge influence that has had on the WWW.

This is social engineering that I like. I hate people serving up weird broken content because they've detected a browser window size.

But it's not even that. Google have discovered some sites return a useful hit, but when the mobile user clicks that link they are re-directed to a non-useful page. That makes Google results less useful for those users. Google is thus only asking you to make those hits as useful as they appear to be. That's perfectly acceptable. It's not different to down-grading people who stuff a bunch of keywords at the end of the page - those are not useful to anyone and thus Google doesn't give them high rating.

If any Googler's (or DDGers or etc) are reading I'd love it if search engines gave me an option to search for "Valid HTML and valid CSS only".

viraptor• 13 years ago

"still struggling to deliver a good mobile solution"

I think that would be irrelevant. But I don't agree that's what happens. They produce an alternative version of the site and additional code, that makes it worse than what they had to begin with. It makes the site a worse place to end up on from search, so it's ranking got nerfed. As much as I sometimes disagree with changes to google algorithms and their position, I think this change is both technically and socially correct. Everyone who didn't spend time and money making their website worse - wins.

kevin_p• 13 years ago

I think you're missing the point. This isn't about penalising having a separate mobile and desktop site, or even automatically redirecting phone users to the mobile site. It's about penalising sites that automatically redirect all mobile visitors to the mobile version's homepage, even if they tried to visit a specific sub-page (eg an article on a news site, product on an e-commerce site etc) through Google search. Which already falls foul of Google's existing rules against serving completely different content to Googlebot and real visitors.

manojlds• 13 years ago

You got it wrong.

It is about, say, an article page, being redirected to the mobile home page instead of the mobile version of the article page.

drivers992• 13 years ago

Google's "job" for the user is to take you to relevant search results. If a link isn't going to take you to relevant results, then it makes perfect sense not to present it to you as a highly ranked result.

dragonwriter• 13 years ago

What? Google are dictating your technology solution here and penalising you if you don't do exactly what they want.

Google is protecting the quality of the UX for its product (web search). If you choose to a "technical solution" that makes search results bait-and-switch for mobile users, it treats your search results as less-likely-to-be-valuable-to-users, because they are.

This is bad news for consumers

Its good news for mobile users of Google search. What consumers are you talking about, and how is it "bad news" for them?

and web masters

Its bad news for bad web masters, sure.

and they're dressing it up as if it's the developers fault when a separate site is a perfectly reasonable solution.

They aren't penalizing developers for using a separate mobile site, they are penalizing you for redirecting all links to the regular site to the homepage of the mobile-specific site. Redirecting from specific pages on the regular site to the specific, relevant content on the mobile site is not penalized.

It's not Google's job to dictate our solutions.

No, its Google's job to assure that their search engine provides relevant, quality results to their users, which is why they penalize sites that do things which would result in users not get relevant, quality results.

weinzierl• 13 years ago

I don't know if they penalize it but they recommend against it:

    App download interstitials

    Many webmasters promote their site's apps to their web  
    visitors. There are many implementations to do this, 
    some of which may cause indexing issues of smartphone-
    optimized content and others that may be too disruptive 
    to the visitor's usage of the site.

https://developers.google.com/webmasters/smartphone-sites/co...

philjackson• 13 years ago

Good news. Something I also find frustrating is when this happens, so I click back and it takes me to the place chucking the 302 causing the redirect again. So, have to click back twice and hope it's quick enough to get me to where I was.

Udo• 13 years ago

To be clear, they're punishing faulty redirects where visitors are clicking on a search result and get forwarded to a completely irrelevant mobile page. Personally, I hope mobile pages in general die a horrible death, but that's probably decades away.

kristofferR2• 13 years ago

I'm pretty damn confident that the internet decades from now won't be a flat box on a rectangular display like it is today. ;)

In 2040 the net will at the very least be seamlessly integrated into our eye sight though lenses (or even digital eyes for the hardcore geeks), maybe even directly feeding information into our brains.

sillysaurus• 13 years ago

In 2040 the net will at the very least be seamlessly integrated into our eye sight though lenses (or even digital eyes for the hardcore geeks

Like a science-fiction writer, one must be careful with predictive dates. The best algorithm seems to be: take your initial guess and triple it. For example, since 1984 was published in 1949, 3x that would yield 2089, which seems a reasonable time frame to move our society from our current status into the complete dystopia the book predicts.

So your digital eyes should be coming out in 2094 or so, shortly after the Ministry of Truth begins erasing words from history books.

pliny• 13 years ago

The frontend for the internet is already "directly feeding information into our brains", but it does so wirelessly.

For some reason doing it with wires, instead, is considered progress.

jamesjguthrie• 13 years ago

I really dislike websites that present me with an 'optimised' mobile website on my Galaxy phone. I'd much rather pinch and zoom than have less content than the real website.

Also, websites that do this on my iPad Retina and make me choose the 'Request desktop site' option REALLY annoy me. The screen's huge! There's no need for it.

joshuak3• 13 years ago

Please. Don't. Make. Mobile. Versions. Of. Your. Website!!11!1!!!

Ask yourself, are you going to put in the same amount of design and content work into the mobile site as the main site? Really? Aren't you just changing the links to buttons, and reusing the content? Be honest.

The one exception is if you are implementing a proper full stack html 5 application. With truly valuable features over the standard website (but then why haven't you done that for the main site too?). Even then, always have a path back to the main site, and keep an eye out for how often that link gets used.

jiggy20112• 13 years ago

What is wrong with reusing content? When I visit a site on mobile I don't want different content because I happen to be using a different device.

joshuak3• 13 years ago

Precisely. There is nothing wrong with reusing your content, so then why would you need a new interface for it?

When you do truly need a new interface to something it's because the nature of the something is different. True mobile apps don't use and apply content the same as a web site any more then a video game is a movie.

untog3• 13 years ago

Ask yourself, are you going to put in the same amount of design and content work into the mobile site as the main site?

Yes? Anyone not doing that in 2013 is deluded- mobile browsing figures are huge and ever increasing. I can forsee a situation where people design for mobile first, not one where they ignore it entirely.

buro9• 13 years ago

This appears to cover automated (Location header) redirects, but it is not mentioned whether it covers the far more numerous sites that use overlays to advertise a mobile app and incorrectly redirect to the mobile home page when the overlay is dismissed. Which is the same effect as the Location header redirect, but far more annoying (as you actually got to see the content you wanted for a brief moment behind the overlay).

matthewmacleod• 13 years ago

Good, it's about time this happened. There's little more frustrating as a website user than attempting to visit a page that precisely matches your query, only to be forced to try and navigate there from the home page. Awful, awful UX, and in some cases it is literally impossible to view content on a perfectly capable device without switching browsers or UAs.

Ideally everything would be nice and responsive, although in some cases we've found that the requirements of mobile users can be very different from those of desktop users. Still a bit of a tricky nut to crack.

brador• 13 years ago

Any idea when Google will be downranking sites that pop up 'download our app' alerts?

Also those annoying sites that load content using 10 second javascript loading circles?

croisillon• 13 years ago

That would be bad for blogspot then...

freehunter• 13 years ago

"This forum has a mobile app! Click here to download Tapatalk for Android!"

Uchikoma3• 13 years ago

Not happy with that decision. (We don`t do redirects)

After working for some time with iOS we recognized that an "app" suites our customers on mobile better than a "site". So we have a classic website for ecommerce, and a rich client application for mobile devices (HTML5, Angular). Both have very different domains and layouts, there is no 1:1 mapping possible except for the most basic features. The RIA page is optimized for gestures, orientation changes etc.

Contrary to mainstream opinion we believe mobile (for ecommerce, where people interact with a site, not newspaper sites etc.) is different from desktop (mouse, keyboard, large screen) and not just a "responsive" small version of your site (or desktop just a larger version of your mobile first site).

bolster• 13 years ago

I think you missed the point.

It's not about defining what experience people get, it's that as they are coming into your site, they get the right experience for your content on their device, regardless of whether they were given a desktop link on a mobile device or visa versa.

As demonstrated in the diagram, this is punishing people who strip the tails off incoming links so the link example.org/stories/good-news-everyone gets directed to m.example.org and the user is left with the mobile experience, but the wrong content.

Uchikoma3• 13 years ago

Then we should show up in the Google search results with different urls depending on the device used for the search. There is no 1:1 mapping of site to mobile "pages" with a RIA.

ig1• 13 years ago

How does that matter ? - when a user clicks on a search result they expect to get the content described in the snippet. If you're unable to deliver that content on mobile then it makes perfect sense for you not to show up in the search results.

If a user is searching for a product and they click on the link to that product in an ecommerce store, they want a product page not your app.

RossM• 13 years ago

That makes sense, but only when searching on a mobile browser. It seems like Google should show different results based on the user agent if penalising for poor support of that user agent.

epistasis• 13 years ago

As a mobile user, if I notice that I'm getting served different content and it doesn't let me do what I could on the full site, it offends me so much that I leave and do my best not to come back. Edit: the other thing that sends me running are bad UI such as attempts at flicking left/right that interfere with vertical scrolling, pages that can't be zoomed, or a page that changes layout on orientation changes and keeps the font the same size. All of these are anti-patterns from people that have thought shallowly about mobile but mistaken it for insight.

Wikipedia has a horrifyingly bad iOS site, but it's the only mobile site I return to; but there's no other site on the Internet that can do that.

coin• 13 years ago

I could not agree more. I wish site authors would not waste thier time with poorly mobile optimized versions. Just serve me the desktop version, my mobile browser can handle it.

snogglethorpe• 13 years ago

Wikipedia has a horrifyingly bad iOS site

Is what iOS gets different than what Android gets, "http://en.m.wikipedia.org/..."?

On Android phone with Firefox, at least, that site seems almost perfect: all extraneous cruft removed, important sidebars intelligently incorporated, the main article text provided in nice readable reflowed form, and all other sections expandable but closed by default. It's easy to read and quick to navigate. I can't think offhand of anything I'd change about it.

prof_hobart• 13 years ago

I don't know what your particular site is, but unless it's something that I'm going to use extremely frequently, I can assure you I'm not going to be downloading an app to use it.

If it's an ecommerce site, where I'm browsing to see what you've got to offer, and at what price, then you've just lost the chance of a sale by not supporting me on a mobile browser.

drivebyacct22• 13 years ago

If you don't do redirects, what's the problem? If you handle desktop web links and open it in your rich RIA "app", then everyone's happy and Google won't care.

But if I click an email from your email http://you/richclient/whatever and get taken to http://m.you/ I will close the tab and never come back (and apparently Google will slap you around a bit)

downandout• 13 years ago

I can't explain how happy I am to see this. The fact that this has ever happened on major sites shows the low quality of web developers currently employed at huge sites. Once you understand the problem, it's a very easy fix for a single developer, so this shows that in large, well-financed development teams, not a single person recognized this as an issue. That is scary. Hopefully these sites will be quickly purged from all results until they get their act together.

bartkappenburg• 13 years ago

The title is a (little) bit misleading. I should state: "Google downranks sites that redirect all mobile requests to homepage"

Ie. There is nothing wrong with redirecting a mobile client to the mobile homepage if the mobile user asked for the homepage.

hmottestad• 13 years ago

I actually had the opposite problem when I was given a link to a mobile page and opened it on my ipad. Then the page recognised that I was using an ipad and redirected me to the front page.

The link is from a norwegian financial newspaper: http://mobil.dn.no/c.jsp?cid=25531331&rssid=25549661&item=ht...

Systemic332• 13 years ago

and at Google we want them to experience the full richness of the web.

Except when the smartphone is a Windows Phone, in which case Google is happy to deliver a CSS stripped website to you.

Check a side-by-side iPhone | Windows Phone comparison: http://imgur.com/a/lquYZ#0

sirn• 13 years ago

Actually, they do that for all non-WebKit browsers. Firefox Mobile get this too.

Systemic332• 13 years ago

It's really an excellent example of Google's "Do no evil" is a joke.

Something about this quote seems very familiar... "You either die a hero, or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain." - Batman

louischatriot• 13 years ago

At last !

FollowSteph3• 13 years ago

Am I reading this right:

"Unplayable videos on smartphone devices. Many websites embed videos in a way that works well on desktops but is unplayable on smartphone devices. For example, if content requires Adobe Flash, it won't be playable on an iPhone or on Android versions 4.1 and higher"

So if your site has flash content and no mobile friendly version you're penalized, well isn't this in essence saying you're being penalized to use flash because almost no one who uses flash has a non-flash version. I don't use flash, but a lot of sites do. Yes it's more for media but where and how exactly is that line drawn....

PS: I think it's a good idea to penalize search results that redirects to the home page for mobile users. You find what you're looking for in google, then can only go to the landing page and good luck fr there. It's just silly.

homosaur• 13 years ago

I'd like to also see downranking for sites that immediately send you to a splash to download their stupid app, which is maybe the 2nd most profoundly annoying mobile behavior. Most of these are doing this with JS overlays and not actual URL redirects, so they won't be affected by this redirect penalty, but lord how they should be.

feintruled• 13 years ago

Similarly, what's with Youtube videos that tell me "the user has chosen not to make this video viewable on mobile devices". Why does Google offer such an option, and why would anybody choose it?

bergie• 13 years ago

Theoretically this could be a content licensing issue. Some music companies for example could prohibit delivery to mobile as they want to squeeze separate money for that.

bhauer• 13 years ago

How about downranking sites that do not redirect back to their desktop variants when a mobile URL is shared and then consumed by a desktop user? Mobile sites can be consumed on desktop browsers, but the experience is not always as good.

I find it odd that the redirect is typically only unidirectional.

exodust2• 13 years ago

Yes you're right that this is also a problem. Along with mobile versions of sites that offer no link to the desktop and vice-versa. Some smartphone users might not want the mobile version for whatever reason.

Luckily there's browsers such as Firefox for Android that allow add-ons. One of the add-ons I have is called Phony which tricks the website into thinking you're on a desktop browser. Often the browser's built-in "request desktop" option is not good enough because the website uses modernizer or something like that to determine if you're mobile.

huttondh• 13 years ago

I think the important thing being discussed here is devaluing versus penalization. Downranking sites because other sites are serving content/users more effectively isn't a penalization it's a downrank. It's also no different than your desktop site being downranked because someone has built a better performing, better delivering site. Penalization is a completely different animal where your site is removed from SERP's. It really just comes down to creating a good user experience and they aren't going to value a mobile site doing a catch all redirect to a mobile homepage just like they wouldn't carry the same value for a desktop site that gets rebuilt and does a catch all redirect from the old site to the new.

Changes in rankings of smartphone search results

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