Google, as with any search engine, wants to provide the very best website results for users based on their search query. So if a website is great on desktops yet loads slowly or has a lot of errors on mobile devices, it’s more likely to suffer with lower rankings in the near future.
In a blog post from Google’s Yoshikiyo Kato and Pierre Far, it stated:
“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.”
This comes about in an effort to improve the mobile experience when using Google search. The Google duo went on to announce the two main factors of misconfiguration for mobile devices. Google are hoping that Webmasters and SEOs take note of these ranking factors and adjust their site(s) accordingly.
The first of the two announced issues is known as a faulty redirect. These occur when a mobile user lands on a website and instead of being redirected to a relevant mobile-optimised page, they’re just redirecting to the mobile home page. A lot of websites do this, redirecting their whole site to the mobile homepage for mobile users landing on the site.
The next most common error is exclusive to Smartphones, with users accessing webpages from smartphones receiving just an error and nothing listed.
