expertise in mobile seo
TRANSCRIPT
Learn to configure your site
•Choose your mobile configuration.
•Signal your configuration to search engines.
• Avoid common mistakes.
• Configure for other devices.
Choose your Mobile
ConfigurationHere, we first need to understand what exactly it
means to go mobile.
Understand different devices
Understand key points in going mobile
Select your mobile configuration
Helping understand different
devices Mobile: Mobile browsers are similar to desktop
browsers in that they can render a broad set of the
HTML5 specification, although their screen size is
smaller and in almost all cases their default
orientation is vertical.
Tablets: Tablets tend to have larger screens,
which means that, unless you offer tablet-
optimized content, you can assume that users
expect to see your site as it would look on a
desktop browser rather than on a smart phone
browser.
Multimedia phones: These are phones with
browsers that are able to render pages coded to
meet XHTML standards, support HTML5 Markup,
JavaScript/ECMAscript but might not support
some of the extension APIs in the HTML5
standard. This generally describes the browser in
most 3G-ready phones that are not smart phones.
Feature phones: On these phones, browsers lack
the capability to render normal desktop web
pages coded using standard HTML. This includes
browsers that render only cHTML (iMode), WML,
XHTML-MP, etc.
Important key points to note
Signal to Google when a page is formatted for
mobile: This helps Google accurately serve
mobile searchers your content in search results.
Make sure search engines like Google can
understand your mobile site setup.
Avoid common mistakes that can frustrate mobile
visitors: Featuring unplayable videos (e.g., Flash
video as the page’s significant content). Mobile
pages that provide a poor searcher
experience can be demoted in rankings or
displayed with a warning in mobile search results.
Keep resources crawlable:
If Googlebot doesn’t have access to a
page’s resources, such as CSS,
JavaScript, or images, we may not detect
that it’s built to display and work well on a
mobile browser. In other words, we may
not detect that the page is “mobile-
friendly,” and therefore not properly serve
it to mobile searchers.
Select your mobile configuration
• Responsive web design: Serves the same HTML code on
the same URL regardless of the users’ device (desktop,
tablet, mobile, non-visual browser), but can render the
display differently (i.e., “respond”) based on the screen size.
• Dynamic serving: Uses the same URL regardless of device,
but generates a different version of HTML for different
device types based on what the server knows about the
user’s browser.
• Separate URLs: Serves different code to each device, and
on separate URLs. This configuration tries to detect the
users’ device, then redirects to the appropriate page using
HTTP redirects] along with the Vary HTTP header.
Avoid Common Mistakes
Blocked JavaScript, CSS and image files
Unplayable content
Faulty redirects
Mobile-only 404s
App download interstitials
Irrelevant cross-links
Slow mobile pages
• Blocked JavaScript, CSS and image files: For optimal rendering and indexing, always allow Googlebot
access to the JavaScript, CSS, and image files used by your
website so that Googlebot can see your site like an average
user.
• Unplayable content: Some types of videos or
content are not playable on mobile devices, such as license-
constrained media or experiences that require Flash or other
players that are not broadly supported on mobile devices.
Unplayable content, when featured on a page of any
website can be very frustrating for users.
• Faulty redirects: If you have separate mobile URLs,
you must redirect mobile users on each desktop URL to the
appropriate mobile URL. Redirecting to other pages (such
as always to the homepage) would be incorrect.
Mobile-Only 404s
• Some sites serve content to desktop users
accessing a URL but show an error page to
mobile users.
• To ensure the best user experience, if you
recognize a user is visiting a desktop page from a
mobile device and you have an equivalent mobile
page at a different URL, redirect them to that URL
instead of serving a 404 or a soft 404 page. Also
make sure that the mobile-friendly page itself is
not an error page.
App download interstitials
• Many webmasters promote their business’ native apps to
their mobile website visitors. If not done with care, this can
cause indexing issues, and disrupt the visitor’s usage of the
site.
The interstitial is blocking the
user from completing tasks
HTML banner lets users
complete tasks while
presenting the app.
Irrelevant cross-links
A common practice when a website serves
users on separate mobile URLs is to have
links to the desktop-optimized version, and
likewise a link from the desktop page to
the mobile page. A common error is to
have links point to an irrelevant page such
as having the mobile pages link to the
desktop site’s homepage.
Slow mobile pages
It is very important to make sure
your mobile site loads quickly.
Users can become very
frustrated if they have to wait a
long time to see your content.
Tablets
When thinking about how to configure your website for mobile
users, it’s common to think about visitors using tablet devices to
access your site.
Responsive Web design: As for smart phone-optimized sites, our
recommendation is to use responsive web design. This means that
your website serves the same HTML code to all devices along with
different CSS style rules to optimize the site’s interface on
desktops, smart phones, and tablets.
Device-Specific content: A website can return different pages
(different HTML, CSS, JavaScript, etc) for different devices. These
pages can be served on the same URL (a configuration called
dynamic serving) or on separate dedicated URLs.
Featured Phones
Our recommendation for sites serving smart
phone users is to use responsive web design if
possible. However, since feature phones do not
have the capability to follow CSS media queries,
webmasters wishing to serve feature phones
would need to configure their sites to either use
dynamic serving or separate URLs to serve the
feature phone content.
Dynamic Servings
Separate URL’s
Dynamic Serving: Configuring your
server to dynamically serve feature phone optimized
contents on the same URL that serves other devices uses
the same implementation as when serving smart phones.
Separate URLs: Webmasters have
three supported configurations when serving desktop, smart
phone, and feature phone users on different URLs. These
configurations use the annotations we’ve previously
described for building feature phone and smart phone
optimized sites.