Google: In Future, Pages With Bad Mobile SEO Won’t Rank As Well In Mobile Search

Barry Schwartz on June 11, 2013 at 11:11 am

Is your site not doing a good job for mobile visitors? Better get that fixed. Sites with mobile experience issues won’t rank as highly in Google’s mobile or smartphone search results, in the future.

Bad Mobile Site? Fewer Smartphone Search Rankings, For You

Google’s Yoshikiyo Kato and Pierre Far said about the change in a blog post today:

To improve the search experience for smartphone users and address their pain points, we plan to roll out several ranking changes in the near future that address sites that are misconfigured for smartphone users.

They followed by sharing two common mobile configuration mistakes of many and suggested these search ranking changes will help import the smartphone search experience for Google users.

Faulty Redirects

The first issue is called a “faulty” redirect, when a page listed in search may redirect all smartphone users to the same single mobile page, rather than to a mobile-optimized version of the page they’re after:

Credit: Google

Smartphone-Only Error

The second common mistake is that smartphone users, when trying to access a web page listed in search, get an error and nothing listed.

Optimizing For Mobile

Google also says that if you properly configure your mobile friendly pages, it will “improve the mobile web, make your users happy, and allow searchers to experience and experience your content fully.”

For more on mobile SEO read our Google mobile SEO recommendations story and our Google Mobile category.

About The Author

Barry Schwartz

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 can be followed on social media at @rustybrick, +BarrySchwartz and Facebook. For more background information on Barry, see his full bio and disclosures, click over here.