This week, Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) announced that it is making some changes to the search results that mobile users receive. The move is an attempt to stop mobile internet searchers from wasting time getting redirected to the wrong place when searching for a specific piece of information.
The change will mean that when a mobile user receives a set of search results from Google, some of the results will come with a warning. The warning reads “May open the site’s homepage” and gives the user two alternatives, either “Try anyway” or “Learn more”. Google says this is an effort to reduce the amount of “faulty redirects”.
Mobile searchers are finding the new system extremely frustrating and are even more irritated that Google decided to do this all on its own. The same frustration is being felt by the sites affected by this new warning, as they are starting to show lower click-through rates. The warning does not apply to searches that return with a desktop URL, only to those that come back with a mobile version of the desktop URL.
There are some simple checks that webmasters can do to see if their site is affected. The first is to search their site in Google. The second is to look in the Webmaster tools as there should be a message there from Google. A third is to check for Smartphone URL errors in the Crawl Errors section of the Crawl menu. The only way to avoid this warning is to set up a responsive site rather than a separate mobile version of the site. Also, you can change the mobile configuration on the server.
