Google Offers Tips For A Search Engine Friendly Tablet Experience (Not Recommendations)

Google posted some tips for building a search engine friendly mobile tablet experience for users and search engines.

Google is clear to point out these tips are NOT specific “recommendations for building search engine friendly tablet-optimized websites.” Google does not have guidelines or official recommendations for tablet-optimized web sites but they did want to offer some tips based off their official smart phone recommendations.

The tablet-optimized tips include:

(1) Unless you offer tablet-optimized content, users expect to see your desktop site rather than your site’s smartphone site.

(2) When offering tablet-optimized content, use responsive design and test the design on many tablet devices.

(3) If you are doing redirection, be careful not to inadvertently redirect tablet users to the smartphone-optimized site too.

(4) Then Google lists on the blog post how you can tell Android phones and tablet devices apart using user-agents.

About The Author: Barry Schwartz is Search Engine Land's News Editor and owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics. Barry's personal blog is named Cartoon Barry and he can be followed on Twitter here. For more background information on Barry, see his full bio over here. See more articles by Barry Schwartz

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http://twitter.com/sharithurow sharithurow

Hi all-

I hate to be the bearer of “bad” news, but responsive design (aka the “one-size-fits-all” solution) really isn’t a good recommendation.

I found dynamic serving to be a much better solution in terms of task completion and conversions. There isn’t much difference between a desktop/notebook computer and tablets. You just have to adjust your style sheets for a finger, not a cursor. And remember that finger sizes vary. So your target audience’s age and gender are important to know.

Google is constantly giving guidelines and recommendations that favor technology-centered design, not user-centered design. So you have to know when to take Google’s (and Bing’s) advice with the proverbial grain of salt.
http://twitter.com/bjankord Brett Jankord

@twitter-12971792:disqus – Google seem’s to know a thing or two about how the web works and what’s good for it, so when they recommend something, you can be pretty sure they have a good reason for it.

Dynamic serving is not a maintainable solution, with each new device that comes out, you have to make sure your device detection solution accurately accounts for it. Dynamic serving is a very fragile technique and is one I think people should move away from.

As more and more web capable devices become available, users will look for content parity across their devices.