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Comment by bru | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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/

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.

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...

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.

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