Google recently made a move to improve the user experience of mobile search users. Its a move that we have expected from a Digital Marketing view point since last year – we simply didn’t know how the move would be made. So the move means that if your website has a redirect for users and it does not go to the equivelant page of a mobile version (or your site is not responsive) you will see a similar message in search as to the one below.
If you are reading this, it’s likely you are a website owner or SEO with this issue. So what is the solution?
Interigate The Issue
First we need to check that the message you are seeing is “smartphone” related and not some other issue. So nip into Google Webmaster Tools for your website, you should have a message if you are seeing these in search results. If not you can still check go to Crawl > Crawl Errors > Smartphone – if you see anything in “faulty redirect” these are the urls you will need to address with the solutions below.
Fixing The Issue
There are a few ways to fix issues with the redirect message from Google. Here are the top 3 we would advise:
- Don’t simply redirect all “smart device” users to the homepage or category pages on a mobile site. Try to ensure a one-for-one experience between the two versions of your website. This isn’t always practical though so where this is the case limit the number of “wholesale” redirects you have.
- Where you can’t redirect users to a similar page on a mobile version of the site, it is advised that you simply “do nothing” and do not redirect them from a desktop site.
- Try updating the design of your website to use responsive web design, this would mean that a single version of your site would serve both mobile devices and desktop devices gracefully.
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