Google Mobile Usability Data Often Inconsistent, Unreliable & Confusing?

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Examples:

In Webmaster tools, Mobile Usability is showing "Content not sized to viewport" for 2 of 7 total pages. The funny thing is all 7 pages on the website use a server side header include file so all pages have the following:

<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width,initial-scale=1.0,maximum-scale=1.0,user-scalable=0">

So obviously the question begs, why these two pages if viewport settings are same on all 7 pages?

So if you dig deeper (click >> on the right) it gives you some suggestions. One is to check the live version using their mobile test.

When we do that for the two pages in question, it says "Awesome! The Page is Mobile Friendly" for both pages!

But then get this, the rendering of the page as it should look is nothing like it actually looks (as verified on more than one mobility tester for the most popular phones) Instead it says below "Temporary error. XX resources could not be loaded" Clicking onthe list resources you see it's all the css and js files. I've seen multiple threads about this issue with no logical explanation or reason. To me, obviouly "Temporary error" sounds more like "our system is sort of broke so it might not work as intended for a while." In addition, going into Webmaster Tools > Blocked Resources it confirms there are no blocked resources.

Furthermore we see two crawl errors for /m and /mobile. The source of the link is the website itself (homepage) so this rules out any external website using these links. The design is repsonsive so a /m or /mobile URL is unecessary. What worries me is even thought he Mobile Usability Test says "Awesome! The Page is Mobile Friendly" then why would it generate these craw error in the first place considering the site was repsonsive right from the initial time it found and indexed the site?

Obviously it is preferable to have a "clean" usability report on any of Google's tools that are related to mobility tests.

If the Mobility Test is saying "Awesome! The Page is Mobile Friendly" then is it worth beating your head over these other errors and inconsistencies? I've yet to find any post anywhere that can definitely describe the issue and how to solve it.

To me, looking at the big picture, I suspect this is a classic example of a very large company not having their development efforts coordinated very well, thus the strange inconsistencies. However these strange inconsistencies can result in many users out there waisting a lot of time trying to fix them when actually there is no problem to be fixed!
#confusing #data #google #inconsistent #mobile #unreliable #usability
  • Profile picture of the author Some SEO
    Thats interesting. What do these pages consist of, is it plain text or some javascript app?

    I use this and it works fine for me:

    <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0, maximum-scale=1.0, user-scalable=no" />
    {{ DiscussionBoard.errors[10453793].message }}

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