I came across this website that was fully viewable on mobile devices, yet search engines flagged it as not mobile-friendly. What was the case?
You might wonder, isn’t mobile-friendliness an old concept, and haven’t main sites always been viewable on mobile devices? True, it appeared fine on personal mobile devices, but until recently, it wasn’t considered mobile-friendly by search engines.
What Does Mobile-Friendliness Offer?
For the first time since the website’s revamp, search engines now recognize it as mobile-friendly. Since websites are ranked based on numerous factors, with mobile-friendliness being a significant one, the site is expected to perform better in search results. This implies increased visibility in search rankings and likely more traffic from search engines.
The search engines saw our page like this:
The Scale of Improvement
Predicting the exact improvement is challenging due to numerous factors influencing search engine rankings, like mobile speed. However, achieving mobile-friendliness is a significant leap forward.
The Technical Journey
Search engines use four primary algorithms, which involve bots (computer programs) reviewing website pages. You can guide these bots on what content to access or ignore (and here lies the crux of our issue). The algorithms are responsible for:
- Discovering Pages: Much like a library index, search engines maintain a copy of all internet content. The first algorithm helps find these “books” or web pages.
- Crawling Pages: The second algorithm analyzes the sites to understand their content.
- Indexing Pages: The third algorithm compares a page’s content with the existing index. If the content is a valuable addition, it’s included in the index, making it searchable.
- Ranking Pages: Finally, pages are ranked based on relevance to search queries.
The Resolved Issue
Bots typically follow all links on a page. To control their access, instructions can be given in a “robots.txt” file. Each website has this file indicating the permissible areas for bots. The issue here was that the site had inadvertently restricted bots from accessing the folder containing the mobile site’s layout, affecting how search engines perceived our site.
Now the search engines see our page like this:
Impact of the Update
With the adjustment in the “robots.txt” file, the search engines now recognize the site as mobile-friendly. This change has led to impressive gains:
- An additional 1600 clicks per month.
- 160,000 more impressions per month.
- The equivalent advertising value of these improvements would cost around €15,000 per year.
(These figures are based on an average cost of €0.80 per click from Google Ads accounts.)
Achieving such savings with just 1 hour of work is undoubtedly impressive!