Changes in rankings of smartphone search results | Hacker News Reader

Changes in rankings of smartphone search results

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293 pointshuskyr90 comments

Finally. Websites in the tech sphere are usually mobile friendly (because they live on the edge of modernity or because they are bare bones and content-centric), but "common" websites often offer a poor mobile experience. Google penalising this is good news for the consumer.

However one point that is not addressed in the article: what about websites that make you go through a first page/pop-up which proposes you to download their app every time[1]? That is an annoying behaviour that I'd like to see penalised as well.

And as usual there is a relevant XKCD comic: http://xkcd.com/869/

[1] here, in France, most newspapers websites do this. Main result is that I do not read news on my phone any more - not a big loss actually.

If only they also down ranked site with total POS mobile sites. Extremely low res graphics, minimal information, massive text. I'm not blind. I'm not half brain dead. I'm just on a phone - your standard site is fine. Have a look at https://touch.trademe.co.nz/

Standard sites aren't always fine. For example, sites where the UI relies on mouse hovering.

There's actually two relevant xkcd comics, here's the second: http://xkcd.com/1174/

By the way, I could never figure out how some sites disable zoom on the iphone? Anyone know?

(I'd love to write a bookmarklet to re-enable zoom)

I'd have a look at the <meta viewport=""> tag.

Thanks! I found this bookmarlet someone already made [1] and I found a page to test it out on [2].

But it doesn't seem to do anything. Any ideas why it wouldn't be working?

[1] https://gist.github.com/beastaugh/725354 [2] http://davidwalsh.name/demo/mobile-viewport.php

Alas, a bookmarklet to re-enable zooming on the iphone is born: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/17087750/how-to-re-enable...

Modern smartphone browsers (at least on Android 4+ including the default browser), allow you to override the website's request to control zoom.

As it should be.

Denying users zoom on a web page with the viewport trick is stupid. Sorry, but it is.

Websites shouldn't "pretend" to be native apps. GOOD native apps that don't respond to pinch and zoom will allow font size change anyway - such as the excellent Falcon Pro Twitter client. Lack of zoom doesn't matter because I can punch in the font size and all is well.

I actually prefer the mobile versions that let you set font size on mobile. For example, when zoomed out in HN comments to a level where I don't need to scroll horizontally, the text is impossible to read on low DPI devices like my 3GS. HN would benefit from this. But I hate not being able to zoom. Perfect example, wikipedia. If sites offered a version like the iOS Safari reader gives you, they would be a plus. Unfortunately, most get it wrong.

Speaking of wikipedia, another annoying bug is that when I go to a non-mobile URL with an anchor tag, it gets stripped out when it redirects to the mobile version of that page, so you end up at the top of the article and not the section you wanted.

Good mobile browsers make sure every column of text gets reflowed to the width of your screen. Isn't this possible on iOS?

No. Mobile Safari is not a very good mobile browser.

If Mobile Safari is a bad mobile browser, what qualifies as a good one?

The non-WebKit version of Opera Mobile and the Android version of Chrome are both significantly better IMO.

I'm using Opera Mobile on Android 2.3 and it reflows text nicely. It has some other problems, but it's far better than the stock browser!

I've been using Firefox Mobile on Android with great success.

You have HN's use of tables to thank for this one.

Mobile Safari only reflows the text in Reader mode. But reader only works on a few select websites. Sites like slashdot and HN aren't supported and force you to horizontally scroll when the text is zoomed to a comfortable level.

I'm not sure what I hate more, horizontal scrolling or not being able to zoom.

You can try this mobile HN app. You can set font size and change it to night mode (Dark theme) if you like.

http://hn.premii.com/

Oh, how much I hate websites that invite me to download their stupid app. And to add insult to injury, whenever I tried installing their stupid apps, it's usually just a glorified, broken and slow embedded browser.

I also hate websites that give me a commercial that I have to skip to get to the actual content. The invitation for downloading their stupid app is just a use-case for such commercials.

Google should penalize all websites that do this and I would love them for doing it.

You want Google to penalise web sites that push ads aggressively?

Right.

http://searchengineland.com/too-many-ads-above-the-fold-now-...

Google already does that.

I don't get this snark. Ads work because they provide some value to someone that causes them to click. If simply inundating someone with ads was enough to make "advertising" work, then Google wouldn't exist and we'd all be Don Drapers.

A kinda-sorta related situation involves forum clients -- multiple different websites offer alerts pointing to the same app, and having to click through the same alert for each website could be somewhat annoying. I'm not sure if this could be detected, though. Perhaps I'm just tired of smackachat alerts.

That's just a result of each forum opting in to using that as their 'native app.' It's annoying that it's the same app every time, but would it be better of all of these forums each had a completely different app they prompted you about?

What? Google are dictating your technology solution here and penalising you if you don't do exactly what they want.

This is bad news for consumers and web masters alike and they're dressing it up as if it's the developers fault when a separate site is a perfectly reasonable solution.

That some sites are still struggling to deliver a good mobile solution is irrelevant and a red herring.

It's not Google's job to dictate our solutions. Do you not remember their rubbish hashbang solution?

I am very critical of Google's algorithm and people's SEO, because of the huge influence that has had on the WWW.

This is social engineering that I like. I hate people serving up weird broken content because they've detected a browser window size.

But it's not even that. Google have discovered some sites return a useful hit, but when the mobile user clicks that link they are re-directed to a non-useful page. That makes Google results less useful for those users. Google is thus only asking you to make those hits as useful as they appear to be. That's perfectly acceptable. It's not different to down-grading people who stuff a bunch of keywords at the end of the page - those are not useful to anyone and thus Google doesn't give them high rating.

If any Googler's (or DDGers or etc) are reading I'd love it if search engines gave me an option to search for "Valid HTML and valid CSS only".

"still struggling to deliver a good mobile solution"

I think that would be irrelevant. But I don't agree that's what happens. They produce an alternative version of the site and additional code, that makes it worse than what they had to begin with. It makes the site a worse place to end up on from search, so it's ranking got nerfed. As much as I sometimes disagree with changes to google algorithms and their position, I think this change is both technically and socially correct. Everyone who didn't spend time and money making their website worse - wins.

I think you're missing the point. This isn't about penalising having a separate mobile and desktop site, or even automatically redirecting phone users to the mobile site. It's about penalising sites that automatically redirect all mobile visitors to the mobile version's homepage, even if they tried to visit a specific sub-page (eg an article on a news site, product on an e-commerce site etc) through Google search. Which already falls foul of Google's existing rules against serving completely different content to Googlebot and real visitors.

Oh, whoops, my bad.

You got it wrong.

It is about, say, an article page, being redirected to the mobile home page instead of the mobile version of the article page.

Google's "job" for the user is to take you to relevant search results. If a link isn't going to take you to relevant results, then it makes perfect sense not to present it to you as a highly ranked result.

> What? Google are dictating your technology solution here and penalising you if you don't do exactly what they want.

Google is protecting the quality of the UX for its product (web search). If you choose to a "technical solution" that makes search results bait-and-switch for mobile users, it treats your search results as less-likely-to-be-valuable-to-users, because they are.

> This is bad news for consumers

Its good news for mobile users of Google search. What consumers are you talking about, and how is it "bad news" for them?

> and web masters

Its bad news for bad web masters, sure.

> and they're dressing it up as if it's the developers fault when a separate site is a perfectly reasonable solution.

They aren't penalizing developers for using a separate mobile site, they are penalizing you for redirecting all links to the regular site to the homepage of the mobile-specific site. Redirecting from specific pages on the regular site to the specific, relevant content on the mobile site is not penalized.

> It's not Google's job to dictate our solutions.

No, its Google's job to assure that their search engine provides relevant, quality results to their users, which is why they penalize sites that do things which would result in users not get relevant, quality results.

I don't know if they penalize it but they recommend against it:

    App download interstitials

    Many webmasters promote their site's apps to their web  
    visitors. There are many implementations to do this, 
    some of which may cause indexing issues of smartphone-
    optimized content and others that may be too disruptive 
    to the visitor's usage of the site.

https://developers.google.com/webmasters/smartphone-sites/co...

To be clear, they're punishing faulty redirects where visitors are clicking on a search result and get forwarded to a completely irrelevant mobile page. Personally, I hope mobile pages in general die a horrible death, but that's probably decades away.

I'm pretty damn confident that the internet decades from now won't be a flat box on a rectangular display like it is today. ;)

In 2040 the net will at the very least be seamlessly integrated into our eye sight though lenses (or even digital eyes for the hardcore geeks), maybe even directly feeding information into our brains.

In 2040 the net will at the very least be seamlessly integrated into our eye sight though lenses (or even digital eyes for the hardcore geeks

Like a science-fiction writer, one must be careful with predictive dates. The best algorithm seems to be: take your initial guess and triple it. For example, since 1984 was published in 1949, 3x that would yield 2089, which seems a reasonable time frame to move our society from our current status into the complete dystopia the book predicts.

So your digital eyes should be coming out in 2094 or so, shortly after the Ministry of Truth begins erasing words from history books.

Sometimes its take your best guess and half it. We are really bad at predicting the future.

I did overestimate it. :)

I actually consider it very likely that good visual prostheses/digital eyes will exist already in 2025, 2040 is more than 2x that (2025-2013=12 12*2=24 2013+24=2037)

Very primitive digital eyes already exist: http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/149106-the-first-real-hig...

I think it's quite likely that we're able to improve the technology a lot quite quickly, a lot of projects doing just that is underway:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_prosthetic

Nope, 2040 is much closer to the truth.

You should add the 3x35 to the original 1949 and not the 1984 (that would be 4x35) arriving at 2054.

Given recent events 2x seems far more reasonable i.e. in 2019 it's gg-time ;)

The frontend for the internet is already "directly feeding information into our brains", but it does so wirelessly.

For some reason doing it with wires, instead, is considered progress.

Headline is inaccurate - they don't downrank for redirects. They downrank for redirects to the mobile homepage instead of the mobile specific page.

I didn't see anything in there about app banners.

(In case it's changed the headline currently says: "Google downranks sites that do mobile redirects / app banners".)

Thanks, i've changed the headline.

To make it even clearer you could add an always: "... that always redirect...". How it is now it's still pretty cryptic :)

Originally the article (at least when i read earlier today) did contain advice about app popups etc

EDIT: seems it was a different, but very similar article - https://developers.google.com/webmasters/smartphone-sites/co...

Finally. This is such an annoying behavior. I wouldn't complain about a small info bubble, but assuming that all visitors comming from a search engine want to install an app before they even know the site is simply ridiculous.

I can't explain how happy I am to see this. The fact that this has ever happened on major sites shows the low quality of web developers currently employed at huge sites. Once you understand the problem, it's a very easy fix for a single developer, so this shows that in large, well-financed development teams, not a single person recognized this as an issue. That is scary. Hopefully these sites will be quickly purged from all results until they get their act together.

Please. Don't. Make. Mobile. Versions. Of. Your. Website!!11!1!!!

Ask yourself, are you going to put in the same amount of design and content work into the mobile site as the main site? Really? Aren't you just changing the links to buttons, and reusing the content? Be honest.

The one exception is if you are implementing a proper full stack html 5 application. With truly valuable features over the standard website (but then why haven't you done that for the main site too?). Even then, always have a path back to the main site, and keep an eye out for how often that link gets used.

What is wrong with reusing content? When I visit a site on mobile I don't want different content because I happen to be using a different device.

Precisely. There is nothing wrong with reusing your content, so then why would you need a new interface for it?

When you do truly need a new interface to something it's because the nature of the something is different. True mobile apps don't use and apply content the same as a web site any more then a video game is a movie.

I don't think there's anything wrong with simply using the same content under a different layout that is optimized for smaller screens/touch.

I suggest you do a quick survey of the replies to this thread. Most people HATE it. Apple designed a browser that addresses the size issue, no reason to do it again poorly.

I also suspect that developers, such as myself, are looking at a site on several platforms and so automatically compare them, but when a user focuses on their phone it fills their perception.

Giving people bigger buttons, and text might seem nicer initially, but it's usually very aggravating when the scaling is locked and with the real site you can scale the text even bigger then the choice you made for the user. Plus many other issues with content relationships (text and images say), usability, etc.

If your designers are going to put as much effort into the mobile site layout as they did to the main site then maybe, but I have yet to see that happen.

I find that many desktop websites are entirely unusable on mobile, because I can't hover over menus without a mouse. Plus, I dislike waiting for 5MB (or more) of webfonts, ads, and javascript to download over a mobile connection in order to read a 3 paragraph blog post.

I don't see desktop sites getting smaller, and I don't think they should get rid of hover-based navigation, so the solution could easily be a stripped-down version for touchscreen devices on slow networks. That doesn't require huge buttons, locked scaling, or high-end design and layout.

Ask yourself, are you going to put in the same amount of design and content work into the mobile site as the main site?

Yes? Anyone not doing that in 2013 is deluded- mobile browsing figures are huge and ever increasing. I can forsee a situation where people design for mobile first, not one where they ignore it entirely.

This appears to cover automated (Location header) redirects, but it is not mentioned whether it covers the far more numerous sites that use overlays to advertise a mobile app and incorrectly redirect to the mobile home page when the overlay is dismissed. Which is the same effect as the Location header redirect, but far more annoying (as you actually got to see the content you wanted for a brief moment behind the overlay).

Not happy with that decision. (We don`t do redirects)

After working for some time with iOS we recognized that an "app" suites our customers on mobile better than a "site". So we have a classic website for ecommerce, and a rich client application for mobile devices (HTML5, Angular). Both have very different domains and layouts, there is no 1:1 mapping possible except for the most basic features. The RIA page is optimized for gestures, orientation changes etc.

Contrary to mainstream opinion we believe mobile (for ecommerce, where people interact with a site, not newspaper sites etc.) is different from desktop (mouse, keyboard, large screen) and not just a "responsive" small version of your site (or desktop just a larger version of your mobile first site).

I think you missed the point.

It's not about defining what experience people get, it's that as they are coming into your site, they get the right experience for your content on their device, regardless of whether they were given a desktop link on a mobile device or visa versa.

As demonstrated in the diagram, this is punishing people who strip the tails off incoming links so the link example.org/stories/good-news-everyone gets directed to m.example.org and the user is left with the mobile experience, but the wrong content.

Then we should show up in the Google search results with different urls depending on the device used for the search. There is no 1:1 mapping of site to mobile "pages" with a RIA.

How does that matter ? - when a user clicks on a search result they expect to get the content described in the snippet. If you're unable to deliver that content on mobile then it makes perfect sense for you not to show up in the search results.

If a user is searching for a product and they click on the link to that product in an ecommerce store, they want a product page not your app.

That makes sense, but only when searching on a mobile browser. It seems like Google should show different results based on the user agent if penalising for poor support of that user agent.

Exactly.

As a mobile user, if I notice that I'm getting served different content and it doesn't let me do what I could on the full site, it offends me so much that I leave and do my best not to come back. Edit: the other thing that sends me running are bad UI such as attempts at flicking left/right that interfere with vertical scrolling, pages that can't be zoomed, or a page that changes layout on orientation changes and keeps the font the same size. All of these are anti-patterns from people that have thought shallowly about mobile but mistaken it for insight.

Wikipedia has a horrifyingly bad iOS site, but it's the only mobile site I return to; but there's no other site on the Internet that can do that.

I could not agree more. I wish site authors would not waste thier time with poorly mobile optimized versions. Just serve me the desktop version, my mobile browser can handle it.

I honestly wish i could upvote you more than once - exactly my thoughts.

I don't know, but it surely pre-dates the smartphone age when the installed browser wasn't able to cope with a more or less fully featured website.

> Wikipedia has a horrifyingly bad iOS site

Is what iOS gets different than what Android gets, "http://en.m.wikipedia.org/..."?

On Android phone with Firefox, at least, that site seems almost perfect: all extraneous cruft removed, important sidebars intelligently incorporated, the main article text provided in nice readable reflowed form, and all other sections expandable but closed by default. It's easy to read and quick to navigate. I can't think offhand of anything I'd change about it.

I don't know what your particular site is, but unless it's something that I'm going to use extremely frequently, I can assure you I'm not going to be downloading an app to use it.

If it's an ecommerce site, where I'm browsing to see what you've got to offer, and at what price, then you've just lost the chance of a sale by not supporting me on a mobile browser.

If you don't do redirects, what's the problem? If you handle desktop web links and open it in your rich RIA "app", then everyone's happy and Google won't care.

But if I click an email from your email http://you/richclient/whatever and get taken to http://m.you/ I will close the tab and never come back (and apparently Google will slap you around a bit)

I'd like to also see downranking for sites that immediately send you to a splash to download their stupid app, which is maybe the 2nd most profoundly annoying mobile behavior. Most of these are doing this with JS overlays and not actual URL redirects, so they won't be affected by this redirect penalty, but lord how they should be.

I really dislike websites that present me with an 'optimised' mobile website on my Galaxy phone. I'd much rather pinch and zoom than have less content than the real website.

Also, websites that do this on my iPad Retina and make me choose the 'Request desktop site' option REALLY annoy me. The screen's huge! There's no need for it.

Am I reading this right:

"Unplayable videos on smartphone devices. Many websites embed videos in a way that works well on desktops but is unplayable on smartphone devices. For example, if content requires Adobe Flash, it won't be playable on an iPhone or on Android versions 4.1 and higher"

So if your site has flash content and no mobile friendly version you're penalized, well isn't this in essence saying you're being penalized to use flash because almost no one who uses flash has a non-flash version. I don't use flash, but a lot of sites do. Yes it's more for media but where and how exactly is that line drawn....

PS: I think it's a good idea to penalize search results that redirects to the home page for mobile users. You find what you're looking for in google, then can only go to the landing page and good luck fr there. It's just silly.

How about downranking sites that do not redirect back to their desktop variants when a mobile URL is shared and then consumed by a desktop user? Mobile sites can be consumed on desktop browsers, but the experience is not always as good.

I find it odd that the redirect is typically only unidirectional.

Yes you're right that this is also a problem. Along with mobile versions of sites that offer no link to the desktop and vice-versa. Some smartphone users might not want the mobile version for whatever reason.

Luckily there's browsers such as Firefox for Android that allow add-ons. One of the add-ons I have is called Phony which tricks the website into thinking you're on a desktop browser. Often the browser's built-in "request desktop" option is not good enough because the website uses modernizer or something like that to determine if you're mobile.

Any idea when Google will be downranking sites that pop up 'download our app' alerts?

Also those annoying sites that load content using 10 second javascript loading circles?

That would be bad for blogspot then...

"This forum has a mobile app! Click here to download Tapatalk for Android!"

Thank god. If I'm on Google search, I want a proper web site.

I think the important thing being discussed here is devaluing versus penalization. Downranking sites because other sites are serving content/users more effectively isn't a penalization it's a downrank. It's also no different than your desktop site being downranked because someone has built a better performing, better delivering site. Penalization is a completely different animal where your site is removed from SERP's. It really just comes down to creating a good user experience and they aren't going to value a mobile site doing a catch all redirect to a mobile homepage just like they wouldn't carry the same value for a desktop site that gets rebuilt and does a catch all redirect from the old site to the new.

The title is a (little) bit misleading. I should state: "Google downranks sites that redirect all mobile requests to homepage"

Ie. There is nothing wrong with redirecting a mobile client to the mobile homepage if the mobile user asked for the homepage.

Good news. Something I also find frustrating is when this happens, so I click back and it takes me to the place chucking the 302 causing the redirect again. So, have to click back twice and hope it's quick enough to get me to where I was.

Good, it's about time this happened. There's little more frustrating as a website user than attempting to visit a page that precisely matches your query, only to be forced to try and navigate there from the home page. Awful, awful UX, and in some cases it is literally impossible to view content on a perfectly capable device without switching browsers or UAs.

Ideally everything would be nice and responsive, although in some cases we've found that the requirements of mobile users can be very different from those of desktop users. Still a bit of a tricky nut to crack.

Similarly, what's with Youtube videos that tell me "the user has chosen not to make this video viewable on mobile devices". Why does Google offer such an option, and why would anybody choose it?

Theoretically this could be a content licensing issue. Some music companies for example could prohibit delivery to mobile as they want to squeeze separate money for that.

I actually had the opposite problem when I was given a link to a mobile page and opened it on my ipad. Then the page recognised that I was using an ipad and redirected me to the front page.

The link is from a norwegian financial newspaper: http://mobil.dn.no/c.jsp?cid=25531331&rssid=25549661&item=ht...

> and at Google we want them to experience the full richness of the web.

Except when the smartphone is a Windows Phone, in which case Google is happy to deliver a CSS stripped website to you.

Check a side-by-side iPhone | Windows Phone comparison: http://imgur.com/a/lquYZ#0

Actually, they do that for all non-WebKit browsers. Firefox Mobile get this too.

It's really an excellent example of Google's "Do no evil" is a joke.

Something about this quote seems very familiar... "You either die a hero, or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain." - Batman

At last !

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