Are you ready to optimize your websites for smartphone search results? Google recently announced that it has made some changes in how it will rank mobile search results. Here’s a compilation of some the most definitive guidelines that you should be following:
Having a separate mobile website version isn’t going to help. Not anymore. Google considers it old school if a website yourdomain.com has a separate m.yourdomain.com mobile version.
Google wants your website pages to have a single URL (without any separate mobile versions). The best way to do is to have a responsive website.
Google still supports mobile proxies but the search engine giant has made it very clear that if mobile proxies aren’t configured well, your website pages are likely to rank lower than you think they ideally should be.
Keep in mind that only a handful of websites have correctly configured mobile proxies. Instead of combating numerous compliance challenges, just go for a one-URL standard. That’s better, both in the short and long term.
If your website has self-hosted or embedded videos (from YouTube, Vimeo, etc.), make sure they’re no playback problems when users try accessing them on their smartphones. Unplayable videos will hit your website’s chances of ranking higher.
In case your website doesn’t have the one-URL standard solution in place, chances are that your website administrator has added some redirects. A faulty redirect implies that users who find your web page links in search results land up on a different page or worse, are served an error page. Google for sure isn’t going to like that.
While you are working on making your website responsive, you may want to use 404 error pages as a temporary fix. Don’t do that. Just serve them the desktop website version on smartphones until your responsive site is ready.
Improper Cross Linking: In case your users choose to opt out of ‘mobile version’ of the website, direct them to the desktop version of the same page. Don’t try pushing them to see a landing page or home page. Neither site visitors nor Google will like that.