Mobilegeddon Help - Googlebot Mobile cHTML & Mobile: XHTML/WML

[Jay-T]

Our website is (www.billboard.com) and we have a mobile website on a sub-domain (www.m.billboard.com). We are currently only redirecting Googlebot Type "Mobile: Smartphone" to our m.billboard.com domain. We are not redirecting Googlebot Mobile: cHTML & Mobile: XHTML/WML

Using this URL as an example: http://www.billboard.com/articles/news/1481451/ravi-shankar-to-receive-lifetime-achievement-grammy, I fetched the URL via Google webmaster tools:

http://goo.gl/8m4lQD

As you can see only the 3rd Googlebot mobile was redirected, while the first 2 Google bot mobile spiders resolved 200 for the desktop page. QUESTION: could this be hurting our domain / any page that is not redirecting properly post mobilegeddon?

[DirkC]

As far as I know if your pages pass the "mobile friendly test" - they get the label "mobile friendly". If you check

https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/mobile-friendly/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.billboard.com%2Farticles%2Fnews%2F1481451%2Fravi-shankar-to-receive-lifetime-achievement-grammy

=> it's considered mobile friendly so it is ok for the mobile update

If you change your user agent to mobile and do a site:billboard.com you can quite easily identify the pages that are not considered mobile friendly (you should see them in WMT as well). If these pages are important in terms of search traffic, you might consider to create a mobile version of these pages as well.

Don't really understand the point of the redirection for the Google bots - your system should normally send all mobile devices to the mobile version. Googlebot will identify itself as mobile device so should be redirected. There is no need to make specific redirects for the bots.

I would try to focus on the performance on your pages - the score from PageSpeed insights is not great (for mobile/desktop) - https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.billboard.com%2F&tab=mobile

Desktop version is loaded in 8sec (http://www.webpagetest.org/result/150429_4Q_15JQ/) - mobile fully loaded in 20sec (http://www.webpagetest.org/result/150429_S8_15QW/) - so there is probably some room for improvement.

Having the mobile friendly label is the first thing, but if your site is slow to load the user experience will not be great and this can impact your rankings for mobile (regardless of the label).

Hope this helps,

Dirk