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Google to Warn Search Users If Webpage Is Not Optimised for Mobile

Google to Warn Search Users If Webpage Is Not Optimised for Mobile

By Robin Sinha | Updated: 5 June 2014 16:02 IST

Trying to address a common problem that smartphone Web search users face, of being redirected to a website's mobile homepage instead of a the specific page seen in the search results, Google has begun displaying this information to users. In case Google detects a faulty redirect to a mobile site homepage, it will note the same below the search result for future users.

Announcing the change on its official Webmaster Central Blog, Google's Mariya Moeva, Webmaster Trends Analyst, said: "We'd like to spare users the frustration of landing on irrelevant pages and help webmasters fix the faulty redirects. Starting today in our English search results in the US, whenever we detect that smartphone users are redirected to a homepage instead of the page they asked for, we may note it below the result. If you still wish to proceed to the page, you can click 'Try anyway'"

Besides giving a warning to users, Google will also start sending those websites a message via its Webmaster Tools application. It will also show them any faulty redirects detected via the 'Smartphone Crawl Errors' section available in the Webmaster Tools. Notably, the new faulty redirect notification is for now only available in English search results for smartphone users in the US.

Google on the blog post also provided advice to help webmasters direct their audience to the pages they want, with a serious of steps to check, learn, and fix.

In another recent improvement for smartphone search users, Google updated its Search app for iOS to version 4.0.0, adding several new features and bringing enhanced functionality. The updated Google Search app (already available on the App Store) adds voice capabilities that let users have 'smarter conversation[s] with Google', similar to Siri. Now users can ask questions by either tapping the microphone icon or can even initiate a query by saying "OK, Google".

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