14 DAY TRIAL // It's no surprise to anyone that a lot of people browse the web on mobile devices these days, even if they do it from home. More and more people use their phones and tablets rather than their laptops.
Plenty of websites have started adapting to this. Some have full-blown mobile websites, others introduced a more responsive design which adapts better to the size of the screen.
Still, as with any big change, there's plenty of confusion. In their desire to cater to mobile users, many sites actually make the experience worse with a few simple, avoidable, yet common mistakes.
Obviously, a poor user experience means annoyed users, which is bad enough. But Google is now making it clear that poorly configured or poorly thought out mobile sites will hurt your site's ranking on mobile searches, possibly worse than having no mobile site at all.
Google has put together some recommendations and a list of common configuration mistakes to help webmasters and web developers.
"Avoiding these mistakes helps your smartphone users engage with your site fully and helps searchers find what they're looking for faster," Google explained.
"To improve the search experience for smartphone users and address their pain points, we plan to roll out several ranking changes in the near future that address sites that are misconfigured for smartphone users," it warned.
One common mistake Google warns about is the use of faulty redirects. Many websites use different URLs for the mobile version of the site and redirect users to that URL if they land on a desktop page.
But many simply redirect visitors to the main mobile page, regardless of where they landed. This means users have to do more work to get to the information they wanted.
Google discourages configurations like these and urges webmasters to redirect visitors straight to the relevant mobile page or to the desktop page if there's no mobile equivalent.
Other common problems are desktop pages that don't work on mobile devices and throw an error rather than direct visitors to a more appropriate page. Also problematic is serving Flash videos to mobile users who won't be able to view them.