Dan Hower

It has been mentioned in another thread that using Google from a mobile shows only results for websites that are smartphone optimized.

I tried it and found that is not the case. The results contain many websites that are not usable on the mobile phone.

Did I understand something wrong?

Thanks
Dan Hower

ppc4profit

It is not true that Google Mobile Search shows only sites optimised for Mobile. As you have seen there are many sites returned in the results which display badly on a mobile screen.

It may be Google's intent to achieve this in due course
- they have a mobile bot
- they keep experimenting with mobile icons next to urls which are mobile optimised

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Jay Moreno

just fyi this happens only in google mobile search for non smartphones the icon only displays if the site is XHTML MP compliant

see this image and the little green icon phone handset here of Google search for non-smart phones...



It doesn't show that icon on Google Search for Smartphones as XHTML MP really isn't required for the majority of smartphone device browsers these days. However saying that your XHTML MP sites will typically run a lot faster than any responsive theme since they are usually much more basic in design.

Google really has no way of defining what a true mobile optimized is without:

a) you submitting a mobile site map
b) using the VARY Header in your code
c) detecting some type of redirect when their mobile search bots hit your site - this is why i believe PHP User Agent redirection is far better than screensize redirect. Google's search bots don't have screen sizes...


From my understanding from Google search for smartphones they don't filter the results.

Am wondering if the do if they will start to pay more attention to the VARY headers which tell the bots that there's a mobile alternative code/content. If they do it will leave a lot of people who use responsive as a silver bullet for mobile dead in the water...

We use an adaptive approach which has the plus points of responsive and standalone mobile optimized sites but all under the same umbrella - it simply renders optimized code based on the user agent, it is a method recommend by Google and also offers the best end user experience regardless of what method your visitor is using to view your site.

Also using an adaptive approach you are also able to provide XHTML MP compliant code to older mobile devices and serve HTML5 doc type and tags to those that support it, making it compatible with all devices not just smartphones

Hope that helps.