Back in March, I put out an article Why websites that are not mobile friendly should be penalized.

Google announced today that websites using “faulty redirects” will have a new warning message in Mobile Google Search. If you’re using one of those terrible mobile websites that redirects people away from the resource they intended on visiting to a crummy mobile homepage, people will finally have a warning in search that prevents them from landing on your website, saving them much frustration (and ensuring people using Google search have a pleasant user experience). The new warning will read “May open the site’s homepage”. After people see what this does once or twice, expect click through rates and traffic to drop quickly. Half of searches in the US are done from mobile devices. Get, it, through, your, head. 🙂

Here’s a screenshot of what the new message will look like:

search result redirect annotation

So, now that we’ve identified the problem, what is the solution? Responsive website design. If you insist on living in a pre-mobile device era go over to Google’s announcement and read about how you can maintain two sites at once, you stubborn old mule. 🙂 If you do this though, rest assured, you will sink in the rankings faster than an attorney in content denial.

non responsive website

 

Len

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