GPWA Times Magazine - Issue 31 - February 2015

The reason this is important to you is because Google is making a decision on whether your site is good for mobile users or not. Penalties for bad mobile SEO So far Google has been fairly relaxed about user experi- ence on mobile, but in June 2013 the company made an an- nouncement stating that mobile site optimization would be a factor in search engine rankings. So far there haven't been many obvious penalties in iGam- ing. For instance, when you go to phrases like “online ca- sino” there are still a large number of sites that have poor or misleading mobile experiences. Typically with Google you get a carrot-and-stick approach; the carrot is when Google encourages you to do things its way, while the stick is a penalty. In November 2014 Google released a mobile-friendliness testing tool. You can go there and check your site out and it will give you a diagnostic analysis ( http://gpwa.org/373) . This is fairly typical; Google wants us to do something and gives us the tools to make it easier to do it. And on top of mobile diagnostic tools, Google will be run- ning notices on search results saying whether something is mobile friendly or not. It's well known that Google auditions sites on search results and demotes them if they don't get suitable click-through rates. So for now, they seem to be letting users make the de- cision on whether or not a site should be ranked by click- through rates. If a site still gets clicks, then it remains in the search results. It's quite democratic when you think about it. Webmaster guidelines Google's webmaster guidelines on mobile site development are really focused on user experience more than anything. Here are the six main issues Google has flagged up for poor- ly structured mobile websites: 1. Unplayable videos Many videos are not playable on smartphone devices because they require Flash. 2. Smartphone-only 404s Some sites serve content to desktop users accessing a URL but show an error page to smartphone users. 3. App download interstitials There are many implementations to do this, some of which may cause indexing issues of smartphone-opti- mized content and others that may be too disruptive to the visitor's usage of the site. 4. Page speed Optimizing a page's loading time on smartphones is particularly important given the characteristics of mobile data networks to which smartphones are connected. 5. Faulty redirects A common error is to redirect a user trying to access a URL on the desktop site to an irrelevant URL on the smartphone site. 6. Irrelevant cross-linking A common error is to have a link point to an irrelevant page such as having the smartphone pages link to the desktop site's homepage. As you can see, most of these things are pretty basic if you're working with a simple website. In fact, any out-of-the-pack- et WordPress installation will have all of this covered. COVER STORY Mobile SEO and affiliates