How Bad Mobile SEO Could Lead To Lower Search Rankings

If your website isn't doing well with mobile visitors, it might be time to look into solutions.

According to a recent Blog post by Google's Yoshikiyo Kato and Pierre Far, sites with mobile experience issues won't rank as highly in the future in Google's mobile or smartphone search results.


From Kato and Far:

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.

The two followed the news up by explaining two common mobile configuration mistakes and then suggested that these future search ranking changes will help to improve the search experience of smartphones using Google. 

Faulty Redirects 
When a page listed in search redirects all users to the same single mobile page instead or the mobile-optimized version it is called a "faulty" redirect. Here is an example diagram from Google below:

Credit: Google

Smartphone-Only Error

Another common mistake laid out by Kato and Far occurs when smartphone users, while trying to access a web page listed in search instead get an error and nothing listed. 

Google says that if your site's mobile friendly pages are properly configured that it will "improve the mobile web, make your users happy and allow searchers to experience your content fully."

This is all interesting news to us at SimplePart. Many of our clients are curious about courting mobile users who are browsing for auto parts on their mobile phones. This news means that SimplePart and our clients will need to focus on making our sites even more mobile friendly going forward.

For more information on Google's mobile SEO recommendations you can go here to get an overview of Google's current mobile policies.