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'Mobilegeddon': Google To Punish Mobile-Hostile Sites Starting Today
jfruh writes: Google has announced that it will be adding mobile-friendliness to the list of factors that will get a site bumped up in search rankings. Sites that have no mobile versions — which includes sites owned by Wikipedia, the BBC and the European Union — will find themselves with lower Google search placement, starting today.
How about doing this ONLY when the person is using a mobile device?
I am a free slashdotter. I will not be modded, blogged, DRM'd, patented, podcasted or RFID'd. My life is my own.
I completely *dislike* mobile versions of sites. Too often they are crippled, difficult to navigate, lacking in detail, etc..
I can't tell you how often I have to tell my browser on my tablet to give me the real desktop site ... because most mobile sites are complete shit.
Links don't work, you don't have the same information, the layout is terrible, and you can't find anything.
In my experience and opinion, most mobile websites are written by morons, to satisfy a checkbox defined by marketing, and are generally pretty much useless.
Since most phones run at the same resolution as a desktop ... WTF is the purpose of a badly written mobile site?
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
It's a shame that there is no way to flag sites as non-mobile friendly that won't be quickly abused. One of the most aggravating things about ostensibly mobile-friendly sites is when they "helpfully" redirect you to the mobile version of the site and in the process forget which page you were on. A close second is sites that nag you to use their mobile app.
So big sites will tell some junior developer "make some grimey mobile style sheet. You've got a week." And we'll end up with something on a mobile browser that's worse than the full site? BRILLIANT.
In the future, I would want to not be isolated from my friends in the Space Station.
The BBC have recently switche from having a separate mobile site to a reponsive design. The responisve site is better than the old mobile site. Will it be penalised for modernisation?
Google are going to promote mobile friendly pages
vs
Google are going to punish mobile hostile pages
Hostile! Not designed for mobile, or not optimized for mobile, but hostile is a little harsh.
Less tabloidy please.
I want my search results to give relevant results, not what they think might be formatted best.... Besides, I still do most of my browsing on actual computer.
But ... how will I get my ad directing me to the mobile app if I can't find the site?
When Googlebot will encounter the subject line, it will flag Slashdot as a mobile-hostile site and put it on the last page of results.
It renders in a mobile friendly format just fine on my phone (unless they mean mobile as in for some crappy browser on some old Nokia style phone).
Instead, how about Google look in their own backyard and make the "mobile" versions of their sites not so shitty and stripped down vs the desktop versions.
I think it is fake trend ,because normal person will not order dishwasher by mobile phone!
That's a counter productive parameter for me because I'm searching from my desktop 100% of the time.
...it sure as hell is now.
Google's search service has always been my go-to service for many years (actually almost since I started reading slashdot, many years ago). All of their tweaks and enhancements, I felt could be justified. But this? This is not really a fair process. I can't see how this will benefit users to find the things they need on the web. As such I will be reconsidering the search engine I'm using in my firefox search widget. Duck Duck go these days seems pretty good.
f u cn rd ths, u r prbbly a lsy spllr.
They made sense years ago when phones had much smaller, lower resolution displays, cellular latencies were much higher, and embedded processors were much slower (for HTML rendering). All that is in the rear-view mirror now.
See for example http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slashdot
Word.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Some sites out there are designed from the ground up to look great on pretty much anything with one version of the site. Will they be punished for their forethought and skill?
The summary says that Wikipedia does not have a mobile site. That isn't true. The BBC article linked from TFA actually says:
Sections of sites owned by the European Union, the BBC and Wikipedia currently fail the search giant's Mobile Friendly Test developer tool.
I just tested the Wikipedia mobile site with their tool and it says "Awesome! This page is mobile-friendly." However, if you feed it wikipedia.org instead of en.m.wikipedia.org it complains that the links are too close together, which is definitely not the case. Even the picture it shows of "How Googlebot sees the page" is quite clear.
Here is my issue with this. If you have a Google "webmaster" account, you've probably seen the "mobile friendly" reports. Everything on my site gets a good grade except... wait for it.... Google's Adsense and Maps JavaScript. It penalizes me for having "content blocking" JavaScript. It's their script. I can not load it "deferred" because it's on a different domain. I could dynamically load it but Google's TOS is very vague as to whether or not this is OK.
Some things need to be said...
IMO, most mobile sites suck. They are more difficult to navigate & are many times missing required features. Watching my wife & son use an Ipad to try & order a phone on Verizon was painful. I logged Verizon on with my Surface & plugged in a mouse & a few clicks later the phone was ordered. That is just one example. With my phone, I try to request the desktop site but quite often I don't get it.
Side note: Verizon sucks but my company gets a huge discount. And my wife still loves her Ipad, & I still like my Surface Pro.
SLOWER TRAFFIC KEEP RIGHT
So when googlebot visits, I'll send it some bullshit to satisfy it. Then continue to operate my website without really having to commit to mobile content.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
2. This has very little to do with ad revenue. Google is always tweaking the algorithms that feed the results page. This does not give any new precedence to paid advertisers at all.
Basically they want you to bring your site into the 21st century. I see no real issue here. Responsive sites that are designed well (IE, not slashdot mobile), can be useful, and you can always request the full desktop site (if the site honors that request). Content and formatting do not exist independently of each other. Do you want some gopher sites in your search results?
Silence is a state of mime.
No thanks Google, my tablet is 13" 1920x1080, I really don't want to see the shitty mobile version of websites. And all you other webmaster fuckers out there: Stop forcing me to YOUR shitty mobile site that is half broken.
According to google's own tests, Wikipedia is indeed mobile friendly:
https://www.google.com/webmast...
No. Our company website was built exactly how you describe, and Google gave it a green light with their test page.
They're doing a good job with this.
This move is clearly a discriminatory move under the Americans with Disabilities Act. With less than ideal vision i rely on the ability to zoom in when i don't have my eyeglasses handy and even sometimes when wearing them. Almost all mobile sites disable the pinch to zoom stuff and make my browser next to useless. Forcing this on the industry is like a large real estate agent saying that they will not list any homes with a ramp or shower handle bar in order to drive the market in that direction.
posting ac because i function fairly normally and don't particularly like talking about this...but im sick and tired of these mobile sites being less usable.
The original google post about this, which makes it clear that mobile friendly sites get a higher ranking when you search on mobile devices . This change will affect mobile searches. Mobile. Not desktop. So if you're searching from a mobile device then results that are more mobile friendly will be ranked higher, on the assumption that people searching from mobile devices would prefer mobile content.
Best Slashdot Co
For some reason mobile browsers default to display things like it's a normal screen and as result have a very tiny font. Instead of fixing the browsers, all sites should instead add "". This should have been the default in the mobile browsers instead.
The whole point of HTML and CSS is that all this markup are suggestions to the client, who is free to rearrange elements, use different fonts or otherwise handle things differently for the benefit of the viewer. Making an entirely different, dumber, website for the benefit of some particular class of device defeats the purpose of a "world-wide web".
Make the devices better, not the websites worse.
Ita erat quando hic adveni.
Google's Android browser and Chrome for Android and iPhone render plain old HTML 2.0 very badly, with tiny unreadable fonts. This is 100% Google's fault. Now they will punish us for their fault.
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
Look, I am just starting with HTML and CSS after several decades of C and shell scripting in order to create a new website fo the small company my son and I are starting. Him, being a young stud instead of an old fart like me, convinced me to start with a design that was "responsive" in NewSpeak. Basically, all that means is: establishing the viewport; determinging several sensible breakpoints at which certain styling elements change; establishing when, say, to transition from a standard horizontal ring menu to a menu button that drops down a vertical menu; and a couple of other small things. At the end of it, it was no BFD and the site works from the exact same URL as the desktop, uses the exact same HTML code, and works on *every* device which can access the site. Finally, I ran our site through the google test tool and it came back as: Awesome! So, stop whining and drop your and layout scheme and just do it. Crikey!
Modern mobile devices have such high res that it's like having a tiny but very serviceable desk top.
...is already SOOO much better that there's no reason to care. Just abandon Big Brother, errr uhhh, I mean Google.
GOOG has to be rather careful in what it does because it has an effective monopoly. _Anything_ that could be seen as anti-competitive, will be. So soon after the EU ruling, GOOG is just bating them.
Are they going to rank up Slashdot when they implement Slashdot Beta?
What a bizarre thing for Google to do. When browsing on my mobile and redirected to a mobile version, the first thing I do is to try to get to the desktop version of the site - it's always, in my experience, easier to use on a mobile than a mobile site.
Countries outside the typical American "first-world" level of development typically rely HEAVILY on mobile devices like cellphones. This decision makes sense, in my opinion.
I wasn't aware this change meant you needed to be using a Google product in order for a page to be ranked higher.
Wikipedia and BBC news will not find itself lower in Google placement
Mobile versions are just excuses to stick static bullshit all over your phone, disable the basic UI features that makes the phones usable, and generally shit all over your mouth. Between Atomic and Chrome I mostly work around the fact that Safari will gleefully prevent me from using the few universal UI commands the phone offers, such as pinch-zoom, "yes scroll past the bottom so I can read the thing the ad is covering" and "zoom the fuck out, Jesus".
On my desktop, I certainly don't give a shit about a site offering me a mobile hell, and neither does anyone else. On my phone, I don't view "has a shitfucked mobile version" as a feature, though others may disagree. Is there a way to turn this new "feature" off? Everyone will want it disabled for desktop, and for mobile, well, I'd love to opt out of all of that crap entirely.
That and all the javascript that launches appstore are easily my pet peeves with browsing on my iphone. That can mostly be worked around by using Chrome, Atomic, or Mercury, but still, sheesh.
Some members of the Pokemon Mafia--Team Rocket, Jessie and James--have been searching for Pikachu.
Sites that have no mobile versions--which includes sites owned by Wikipedia, the BBC and the European Union--will find themselves with lower Google search placement, starting today.
See, Wikipedia is the BBC and the European Union.
To make this a serial list instead of a parenthetical expansion, you need a comma before the conjunction on the last member of the list. Consider the following list: Ham, turkey, bacon and eggs, peanut butter and jelly, fish and chips. Now consider the following list: Bacon and eggs, peanut butter and jelly, fish and chips, ham and turkey. This is a different list, as it lists an item called "Ham and turkey".
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Are they looking for media queries in CSS? Popular responsive frameworks such as Bootstrap or Foundation?
Or is is "discrete" UIs only, such as a mobile.mysite.com with a completely overhauled interface?
And just how friendly is friendly? By what standards are they applying this from a UX perspective if at all?
Is Google now trying to be the Mall cop of the internet?
I suspect that this is a ruse to give Google another avenue of plausible deniability for obfuscating sites they don't like or who compete with Google properties.
Sections of sites owned by [...] Wikipedia currently fail the search giant's Mobile Friendly Test developer tool.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
I couldn't agree more! The unmitigated gall of this company whose core business is searching deciding to change the parameters of how they rank and display search results. I was ok with everything they did up to this point, but this is too much! I already have a call out to my congressman and am writing a formal letter to the DOJ.
yes, please have some sanity / brains about it
when i'm on a mobile device, then having a mobile friendly version is really nice.
But if I search on my desktop for "hippo", I'd rather get Wikipedia's hippopotamus page, than Jimbob's EnCyclopeia of Knowledge and Stuff, even if Jimbob knows how to make a mobile friendly page.
You can always count on the Internet to implement good concepts poorly and parade the result as cutting edge technological innovation.
One thing I've always liked about HTML was from very early days before even CSS or Google the "promise" of targeting vast arrays of client form factors with the same information. This sounded great but proved in to be mostly unnecessary and divorced from reality.
Rise of "Responsive" sites more often than not translate back into frustrated desktop, laptop and tablet users with sites resembling pre-tables era childish web layouts boasting comically large fonts and painfully low information density. Paradoxically these "features" persist even when viewed from my mobile phone with the same display resolution as a large HD TV or desktop monitor. Very few appear to actually be capable of designing single scalable sites that don't suck.
There was a time when mobile sites were necessary. Given the proliferation of display sizes, LTE, multi-core multi-ghz processors with GBs of RAM.. that time has came and gone. Google is trying to catch up to a need that for the most part was already solved by hardware and software innovation and no longer exists.
If your going to punish sites for not as judged by a naive non-human algorithm offering something that is not "appealing" to a human using a client of a specific form factor or capability then do so across the board without bias. When I do a Google search from my desktop penalize all search results that consist of mobile handset optimized sites with comically large fonts and childish layouts.
What determines the worth of a website to me has never been layout it has been content and lack of annoying BS. All "looks over brains" does is give legions of spam trap link-baiting sites an even greater advantage.
Stupid all around to say nothing of negative implications of people waking up to the dangers of Aggregation of power into the hands of so few.
The test Google is doing is not looking for a "mobile version" of a site, it's looking for whether the site renders well on mobile. They're looking for basic things - are the fonts big enough to read, are the links clickable, etc. The BBC site (at least BBC News) passes their tests fine. They have a tool you can use to test for compliance.
---- Den ene knappen er powerknapp, den andre er Bender voice knapp "Bite My Shiny Metal Ass"
That explains why in the past few days Google has been hitting all my websites looking for /mobile and /m.
For me, they jumped the shark / violated their unofficial motto the day they declared war on the microSD card in their hardware. I could never get too riled about the morality of doing business in China or submitting to the will of three letter agencies here at home because unlike many people I was never under the illusion that they were some kind of activist organization. "Evil" was therefore obviously a reference to not fucking up their own products in an attempt to manipulate their customers into, say, using their cloud storage solution.
Also, I seem to be the only one who finds it extremely alarming that Google has devoted a lot of energy to replacing GPL pieces in Android with BSD-style licensed equivalents. This isn't a simple precautionary exercise or worries about "viral licenses". This certainly isn't about freedom. The moment AOSP projects threaten them (or become an inconvenience) they will simply change licenses and break backwards compatibility. Geeks will struggle mightily to make non-geeks care about this, but there will be no viable alternative in the marketplace, millions will be locked into Google's content ecosystem, and the OEMs (with the possible exception of Amazon) will obediently follow Google.
I posted this story a day ago but it wasn't put on the front page, but someone else's post of it now has been.
Anyway I think what is really bad is that sites are changing (being forced to change by Google) their web pages that get shown on normal desktop PCs so they work better on mobiles but worse on desktop PCs (eg. check nsandi.com on a full HD PC and look at how unnecessarily massive the text is, and how it scrolls in a bad way). Google tells webmasters their font size is too small for mobiles (or links too close) - when they're perfectly fine for PCs - and now we're getting sites like the above with unnecessarily massive text on a full HD desktop.
What's the point in having a PC with a full HD monitor if sites are going to use massive text and scroll as if it was a mobile phone? Google says for those sites "great, this site works well with mobiles" but their forced change has meant it looks much worse and interacts much worse on desktop PCs.
Those sites tend to be ones where they skipped making a useful desktop version and only made a crippled mobile version and called it their website. Many very large corporations think this is the way to go these days, but it doesn't make for a better site.
The correct answer is to go the other way, make only a fully functional desktop site, and let mobile users use it without blocking them with crippled "mobile" sites, broken apps, etc.
They don't do a good job with client-side XSL transforms, though. If you serve an XML page that XSL-transforms itself into HTML, Google's test page will fail it as not being a web page. This can be important for stuff like TEI documents, which nobody really wants to run server-side transforms on, since you don't know if the consumer is going to be a human reader (hence the client-side XSL to pretty output) or a machine that requires the original XML.
Not all sites wanted to or need to support all mobile form factors. It is not up to a bloody search engine to dictate such support to websites. Bad Google. Prepare to be slapped.
I really dislike most mobile sites. What Google is doing is curious, and perhaps counter-productive - maybe even in the intermediate term. There are all these sites that optimize their disinformation to move up in Google search rankings. If you are doing real research, and looking for real info, don't you flip to maybe page 7 before you even start clicking thru? Is not the whole Google ecosystem starting to smell a little bit funny?
And what about DDG? I find I am using DuckDuckGo more and more. It is quick and finds stuff. All I need.
And I go out of my way, even using older devices (like my old Playbooks), to choose reliable operation, and default to desktop sites. I can get real work done, and end the business day with cash in bank or pocket. That beats all the modern "features" of most smartphones, many of which are starting to look like malware. But hey, I am just an Anonymous Coward, so maybe I am wrong. Who needs privacy, choice and honesty? Go Google...
And what of their own developer.android.com site? Last I checked it was not really "mobile friendly" either.
When I do a search sometimes I want a mobile site and sometimes I couldn't care less because I am on a fucking desktop.
Or I'm on a mobile device but really whether the site I am viewing has or doesn't have a mobile site doesn't especially matter to me.
I want to be able to turn that aspect of the search criteria on or off. If I can do that, then I'm fine with this. If not... I'm happy to use Bing.
Anyone used bing lately? They actually do a good job.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Yes, it seems you _will_ be penalized for creating a website that is Mobile Friendly :- use plain HTML where the presentation is strictly up to the browser, and the Google check tool uses a default tiny, tiny font and then complains that your website has fonts that are too small !
Ironically, Chrome (on Android at least) doesn't have this problem - plain HTML websites are perfectly readable, making a mockery of Googles check tool.
If a website is responsive, would that website be considered mobile friendly? Many responsive sites work fine on mobile devices.
That's not very likely. They're just flailing around. Look at how crippled gmail is. Look at all the Google products that have bit the dust, or been half-assed from day one, like Google Base. Look at the one big thing they did right -- text ads. Seen one lately?
I spend the first few moments on every site telling my mobile browser to "request the desktop site." My phone has a higher resolution display than my desktop monitor does. Plus awesome zoom and pan and a bunch of other stuff I can't really do at my desk yet. The *last* thing I want is a "mobile version" of a web site. In a word, they suck.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
All my browsing is done on a 17" screen (yeah, I may be a dinosaur, what of it?). I don't want a crappy-assed version of a site. If stuff is pushed down because it doesn't have a feature that I don't need/want, then I need to find a different search engine.
Bad enough to end up with a 4" column on a 17" screen with some sites.
As I said, on my tablet I'm constantly saying "request desktop site", because the mobile website is utterly useless. It's worse than useless, because it's just a redirect to a badly written website with crap content.
I used to do the same thing; mobile sites are fine for tiny screens, but suck on most tablets, especially 10" and larger ones. I got sick of having to change to the desktop site all the time, so I went addon-hunting and found Desktop by Default for the android version of Firefox.
It just changes the default setting for the "request desktop site" checkbox, so you can still get the mobile site by unchecking it when needed (like Slashdot, where the stupid desktop version's moderation threshold sliders don't work on mobile devices).
The BBC has got mobile pages. My phone and tablet keep going to them. Like in the XKCD cartoon, they are flawed.
There are some nice apps for it anyway. My favourite one comes with a nice widget too.
Wikipedia has several apps available for my phone. I suspect that there may be something available for users of iThings too.
because of that, there is no need for mobile pages because of a better alternative.
I suppose I knew that the EU would have had a website but I don't see what benefit a mobile version would bring.
On the whole, most mobile sites are annoying and incomplete in comparison to the "proper" one.
Sometimes the only thing I need is to be able to zoom in.
Conclusion: Mobile versions are not always needed.
I'll see your Constitution and raise you a Queen.
I use Wikipedia mobile site every day. Content is delivered perfect for mobile.
Why does the summary call out Wikipedia and BBC both of which have websites that are optimised for mobile devices?
Give me a nicely formatted full-content Responsive Design version of a site any day over a full desktop experience.
There are lots of studies that show that a fast full-featured mobile site decreases bounce rates sharply and increases page views by 2x.
Ultimately Google will score sites based on whether the user bounces back and it is well known that a slow desktop site on mobile will cause a user to bounce.
So they're updating the scoring algorithm accordingly.
Claims that Google are doing it for advertising or other reasons are unfounded. I have been around a lot of Googlers and almost always, especially the search team, are ruthlessly focussed on what is the right the thing to do for the user.
Google expects the change to cause a big impact which will affect traffic and revenue for sites that heavily rely on search results. Look for a responsive web design company to maintain the same level of traffic to the site.