Slashdot Mirror
'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.
See for example http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slashdot
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.
because their algorithm is exploited. because the internet is migrating to stupid youtube crap which contains the info you needed after 15 minutes of irrelevant stuff. because wikipedia, which for all its good intentions is a monoculture, gets top spot.
and finally, because by dictating which protocol you should use, caching be damned, and which mobile layout optimization should be performed, they ceased being a search engine.
A search engine is about Content not Presentation.
---- MISSING MISCELLANEOUS DATA SEGMENT --- [sigdash] trolololol
Mobile sites too often disallow zooming, fill half the small screen with oversized nav buttons, and just generally suck. What this is probably really about, given the example in TFS, is sites that discourage mobile browser access in favor of offering their own app that has a better experience. Can't get to google using the Wikipedia or BBC apps!