With the indexing issue, people have also reported that Google has problems showing their rich results in the search results and claiming their mobile-friendly pages are not mobile-friendly.
In the past few days, I’ve received numerous complaints about both – the rich results no longer appear in the search results, and Google is saying their pages are no longer mobile-friendly. Danny Sullivan from Google responded to the recipe markup issues, saying Google is investigating them after other reports have come in:
But I suspect they are also investigating the mobile-friendly issues. The truth is, I saw more complaints about mobile-friendly problems than about recipe or schema issues. To view many of these sites, you must know that you can replace the leading “www” with the letter “m” followed by a dot and the domain name. The mobile web address then becomes “m.yourdomainname.com.” This rule of thumb is quite common for many mobile-enabled websites. Another common workaround is to replace the “.com” after the title with “.mobi.” Should you be searching with a mobile device on the mobile web, the process may be more involved but not necessarily more confusing.
All major search engines now have mobile versions of their online services to compensate for this. You should note that Google has m.google.com, the newest version of Microsoft’s Bing, which can be reached at m.bing.com, and Yahoo may be accessed on the mobile web at m.yahoo.com. Another mobile web feature for these sites is confining settings and formatting pages from your mobile phone to be viewed in a way you prefer for your device. The current default is that you will normally see page content in a single column with minimal graphics. This also means you will not have to zoom in on your mobile screen to read the results once the pages load.
Ideally, and most likely, the best scenario is to combine mobile search engine results with SERPs specifically designed for mobile devices without requiring the search engines to reformat large-scale web pages. Many mobile web search engines and directories are intended to provide this automatically. One of the best examples of this is Taptu.com, as it only provides searches for mobile-compliant websites. Taptu is also a downloadable stand-alone app for smart devices like the iPhone or the iPad Touch. Also, mobile web surfing will continue to become more mainstream with the advent of the Google Android phone.
Optimizing for the Mobile Web
When it comes to optimizing your web content for Google Mobile and other mobile search engines, there are several things that you need to consider. Much has been written about developing a mobile version of your traditional website. Another approach often suggested is to make sure that your existing sites are “mobile-friendly,” which simply means that they are easily accessible for mobile browsers.
So, whether you optimize your traditional websites for the mobile web or invest in a new mobile-compliant version of your website, there are certain things you can do to improve your ranking in mobile search results. Here are a few reasonable suggestions.
One of the easiest approaches is to create a “sub-domain” for your mobile web version instead of launching a separate domain like a dot Mobi site. This results in giving your mobile site a name like “mobile.yourdomainname.com.” This will allow you to retain the branding of your current TLD without doing a lot of extra search engine optimization. This will work fine if your desired dot Mobi name is not registered. You can also accomplish this by creating an extension like “yourdomain.com/mobile,” just like you would for a blog.
