The Mobile web
is growing at a pretty rapid pace, and is becoming more and more
significant, especially in terms of search traffic, because more and
more people are now using their smartphones to Google things up. Since
smartphones have become so powerful these days, there's no reason why
they shouldn't experience the full richness of the web. Engaging
smartphone users by doing mobile SEO is one way to increase your traffic.
And in the near future, Google intends to penalize sites in search
results that are misconfigured for mobile. Here are some of the mistakes
people make in mobile SEO, and how to avoid them.
Faulty redirects
Mostly, webmasters have separate smartphone versions of webpages in
addition to their desktop counterparts. When a smartphone user lands on a
desktop page, he is usually redirected to the corresponding mobile
version. But sometimes, these redirections might not go as planned, as
described by the following scenarios.
- When no mobile version of a page is available, the user might be getting redirected to the homepage. This means the user has to do a lot of work, and isn't generally happy about it.
- Suppose you have a website where you can search and/or sort data, as is the case with product listings. Now, the URL parameters (e.g. www.example.com/search.php?product=13) for the desktop version might not be parsed properly, or at all by the mobile version, which means that smartphone users will not be able to search the content.
- You might have set up redirection checks for some mobile platforms, but not all. For example, you might have checked for Android and iOS, but missed out on BB, WP, Ubuntu etc.
Check out your website thoroughly, and see if none of these problems are
occurring. If they are, then most probably, there was no equivalent
mobile version of the desktop content. The best solution would be to
just return the desktop version of your pages to smartphones, instead of
redirecting them.
Smartphone-only errors
Sometimes, users are able to open a page on a desktop, but they get a
404 error when accessing the same page on a smartphone. Again, there can
be various reasons.
While these are only some of the mistakes, it is important to put
yourself into the shoes of an ordinary smartphone user, and see the
flaws in your website from that perspective. Hope you understand the
problems associated with mobile SEO.- The page a user is looking for on mobile might not actually exist as a mobile version.
- If you recognize a user is visiting a desktop page from a mobile device and you have an equivalent smartphone-friendly page at a different URL, redirect them to that URL instead of serving a 404.
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