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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.
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.
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.
From what I read on this. No.
The "mobile friendly" check won't be checking for a browser switch or dedicated mobile site, but do a test rendering and check stuff as minimum font default height on mobile devices or minimum button size. Load times and filesizes are already factored in the current search, as much as I know.
bickerdyke
Some websites are even worse. They force you to a mobile website, which then offers a link to their app on an app store as the only content.
The app will then require you to give them enough permissions to shoot pictures and mail them to all your friends while you sleep.
I remember one mayor image-hosting website did this. I don't remember which one it was as I neither installed the app nor stayed on their site any longer.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
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.
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
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?
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
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. 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 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.
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.
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.
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.