HN is Google's bitch. And probably you are too | Hacker News Reader

HN is Google's bitch. And probably you are too

18 pointsz3t417 comments

I received a mail from Google last week where they threatened to lower my page-rank if I did not do some updates to my homepage.

If you are a Webmaster, you have probably also received the same mail. And probably HN too as today when I opened up the HN page in my mobile browser, everything was "messed up", ruining my experience.

  "These pages will not be seen as mobile-friendly by Google Search, and will therefore be displayed and ranked appropriately for smartphone users."

So Google uses it's powers to enforce "mobile-friendly", even though you can view most pages just fine even if they do not have the meta viewport and "mobile friendliness".

Google only use one single metric when they make decisions like these. And that is their revenue. They do not care about the user experience on your site, the only thing they care about how much money they get from redirecting to it.

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On the contrary, I think this shows that they do care about the user experience on your site.

I'm not sure what you define "mobile friendly" as, but a lot of sites that haven't made much of an effort to cater to mobile users suck on a phone. A 200px sidebar fixed to side of a viewport works great on a laptop - not so much on a phone. Miniscule text isn't very friendly either (and no, zooming isn't really a great alternative).

HackerNews is, as far as I'm aware, working on a responsive redesign of sorts. Reading the recently released API docs, the API would help this by reducing the reliance upon HN's HTML for people scraping the site because of the lack of another data source.

I do not think an automatic web scraper can decide what's "mobile friendly" or not.

The HN site was just fine before they decided to do what Google classifies as mobile friendly - totally ruining my experience browsing HN.

You shouldn't design a web page to satisfy Google, you should design it to satisfy your users. Even Google itself has said that. But yet they force Webmasters to make certain changes, and in some cases like HN, making the mobile experience much worse.

I'd think Google are capable of making a web scraper that can have a very good guess.

Plus, it's not really Google's fault that a website isn't usable - that's something the website developers are responsible for.

Google (and others) have automatic scrappers that check if the colors are different enough to be readable. They certainly can check if the content is visible on a specific screen width, that horizontal scrollbars do not appear and that the touch event is properly handled etc etc etc.

Today I received another letter for a site that has a separate mobile page. It appears that the Google bot is unable to find the mobile version.

I highly doubt Google check CSS to find colors - they probably just check for <font> tags. Google and other search engines are incredibly easy to hack. Do you seriously think they render every site they crawl!?

That said, Google is still the best search engine. They have just become Too greedy, forcing Webmasters into design paradigms. Just because they saw an increase in ad revenue doing so. Witch probably had nothing to do with the design change - people probably just spent a bit more on adwords after receiving the warning.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9205733 Is this related?

I received it for domains I have robots.txt set for Google to not crawl. I do suspect Google didn't think when they set this one up.

Go check your traffic figures. Far too many sites are ignoring mobile because they don't want to invest in the developer overhead to sort it out. Google recognise their traffic has gone mobile, and will continue to grow movin fwd, so to continue to serve shitty experiences at the top of the result is a competitive disadvantage. Seriously common sense stuff. Ironically go ask anyone with an Adsense account how mobile traffic is performing for them. The real estate of screen available for mobile makes adverts much less appealing, and there is even more banner blindness.

To be fair, the HN mobile experience is terrible.

There are three problems with HN mobile:

1: the vote buttons

2: long unbroken text isn't wrapped or hidden which forces a weird zoom

3: on chrome on iOS the text entry box is a single line. They keyboard takes half the screen, the "previous item" "next item" and "close keyboard" menu takes up a huge amount of space, and the address bar takes a quarter of the screen which leaves a space for about two lines of text. This isn't something HN can fix.

http://imgur.com/gjLdS6A

And a perfect example as to why Google says having a mobile-friendly web site is important.

Your emotions seem to be getting the best of you. If anything, this shows they care about mobile experience as much as desktop one.

And yes, they need to ensure their source of income because.... wait for it.... they're a business!

I'm dumbfounded at how many people think that the world is just supposed to run for free?! So employees shouldn't get paid?!

I don't think HN cares particularly about its page rank.

What else are you expecting from a 'free' service? It services it purpose, it partially meets my needs, and that's enough.

It is a really weird set of values they have at Google.

On the one hand, Matt Cutts thinks nothing of telling the world what kind of content to produce, and how much of it, and how often, and how to mark it up and organize it in order to rank highly; something which has led to so much bloviating corporate "social media" and outsourced SEO spam that everyone just takes it for granted that most Google results are transient garbage.

Yet on the other hand, the company won't regress actual site popularity against search visibility using Google Analytics or whatever to find out what lower-ranking sites people actually use. Which exactly do they think is more invasive?

Bing on the other hand, uses click and user following as one of their strongest signals. I know this from several calls with their engineering team while I was helping the growth team at Facebook get in more search results.

As a side note, Zuck told my boss that seo is a true waste of time, and he doesn't understand why we bother.

Maybe switch to Bing if you feel strongly?

You are confused. While having mobile-friendly web sites is beneficial to Google in many ways, I'm sure, you are arguing that it is the only benefit of having a mobile-friendly web site which is false. I am positive, from your own personal experience and mine, that you will not continue viewing any web site that is difficult to read or navigate on your mobile device. I am positive that any site that is not mobile-friendly has far more dropouts than one that does.

Mobile viewing has become a huge part of any web site's visitors. To ignore their ability to view your page is a word that might get me downvoted.

To post in search results that a site is mobile-friendly is an aid to the searcher because they know they won't be wasting their time trying to view non-friendly sites. It is helpful.

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