New Google Rules: You Can Keep Your Mobile-only Website if......

As we move toward April 21, the day Google will start lowering the ranking for websites that are not mobile friendly in its mobile search results, a question keeps coming up; if a website has a mobile-only sub-site, does that count as mobile-friendly?

A mobile-only site is a mirror of the original site built for mobile devices only. It is usually set up as a sub-domain of the main domain URL. It is conventional, though not required, to use "m" to designate the mobile-only site. So for www.mywebsite.com. we would have the mobile site at m.mywebsite.com. Many of the world's larger websites have mobile sites. When a mobile user accesses the main URL, a special program "sniffs" a piece of information in the initial data package that the mobile user's device sends with its access request. This information, the user-agent, tells the website server what kind of device it is. Mobile device users are then redirected to the mobile site.

Why a separate mobile site? Why not just build one website as a responsive site and be done? The answer lies in the huge diversity of devices out there in the global world, which today still includes many, many feature phones without all of the capabilities of smart phones. Large global companies want to give feature phone users a good experience also, which is difficult to achieve in a responsive site that must serve a huge range of screen resolutions. Hence the mobile-only site.

Back to our question, is the mobile-only site doomed because of Google's new filter? As it turns out, no, but some changes might need to be made. In our testing with Google's Mobile-Friendly Test Tool, we found that sites with mobile-friendly sub-sites passed the test just fine, with some exceptions. Those exceptions involved a file called robots.txt, which is stored on a website's server, and provides search bots like Googlebot with specific instructions for which site resources NOT to index. It is possible to set up robots.txt to tell search bots in index nothing, avoid the whole site.

The websites that did not pass returned an error "The requested URL redirected to https://m.examplesite.com, which is dis-allowed by robots.txt". That means the redirection is working fine, but it appears that the sub-site's own robots.txt file is preventing Googlebot from indexing the sub-site. When we checked robots.txt files for the sites returning this error, we found in every circumstance that in fact the robots.txt file was set to prevent indexing of the sub-site.

Why would anyone do this? As these sites are generally sites for large companies designed and maintained by large design firms who have their own design/accessibility secrets, it's impossible to say precisely in each case. However, one thought is that they don't want Google indexing the sub site because it isn't a complete site. There was a time not all that long ago when the reigning philosophy was that the mobile user did not want or need the level of rich content that the desktop user enjoyed. As better smartphones came on the market and better user data was sourced, the design world discovered that in fact the mobile user wanted the exact same experience that the desktop user enjoyed. Some large sites converted to responsive which left some legacy feature phone users behind. Others built out their mobile sub-sites to be full (or nearly full) mirrors of the main site and saddled themselves with the maintenance costs. Others hunkered down and kept the minimal sub-sites, using robots.txt to shield them from Google. These latter sites do not conform to Google's rules, as they do not deliver a quality user experience to the mobile user, and as a result they do not pass the mobile-friendly test, and may take a hit on mobile search results.

My feeling is that these larger companies are going to have to improve their mobile-only sites and remove the robots.txt dis-allow restrictions, which I think Google will not tolerate in this situation. Enterprise-level content management systems usually have tools for concurrent management of mobile sub-sites. While these can be pricey, they may be the best alternative for avoiding a mobile results penalty.

Steve Glass is Chief Marketing Technologist for Oinkodomeo, a company that specializes in aligning B2B Marketing, Sales and Information Technology.