Google is making substantial changes to the way they index mobile sites:
Starting April 21, we will be expanding our use of mobile-friendliness as a ranking signal. This change will affect mobile searches in all languages worldwide and will have a significant impact in our search results. -- Google
SearchEnglineLand.com had a great write-up this week about how to prepare for these changes, much of this advice may be immediately applicable to your situation Victor -
Excerpt from "
Take These 3 Actions To Ready For Google’s Mobile Search Update"
1. Identify & Improve Your Mobile Web Optimization Status
Even if you have a mobile-ready site, it’s important to dig deeper by doing a mobile SEO audit so Google can correctly identify and serve your mobile content.
Start by validating your site with
Google’s mobile friendly test tool, making sure the site resources such as images, CSS, JS are also crawlable.
For similar insights, you can also view the
Google Webmaster Tools mobile usability report, which will alert you to various
mobile usability issues such as the use of Flash, improperly sized content, and touch elements that are too close together.
Check Google Webmaster Tools’
Crawl Errors report and select the “Smartphone” tab to identify if
Google’s smartphone crawler has found any problems when crawling your site. For example:
- Are you blocking important areas of your sites that should be crawled and indexed instead?
- Are your pages not being found, returning soft-404s or 404s?
- How has the smartphone Googlebot found these errors?
- From which pages and XML sitemaps are they being linked or referred?
Identify the sources of these crawling issues, making sure to unblock or block as needed and avoid linking or referring to non-existing pages.
Use the
fetch as Google feature in Webmaster Tools and select the “Mobile Smartphone” option to see how Google’s smartphone crawler sees your most important pages. Ask yourself:
- Is it accessing to the right version, or is it being redirected to a non-relevant page?
- Is the content accessible?
- Are the relevant SEO elements, such as the title and meta description of each page, being discovered?
- Are the site pages set up correctly (including the relevant annotations, http status, user agent detection, etc.) based on your chosen mobile site configuration?
Perform this analysis on a site-wide basis by using crawling tools like
Screaming Frog or
DeepCrawl, which allow you to select the smartphone Googlebot as your user agent.
Site speed is another important optimization consideration, as this is a
ranking factor for both mobile and desktop sites. Use Google’s
PageSpeed Insights tool to check for page speed issues on your mobile site:
You can also use the
Speed Suggestions report in Google Analytics (under
Behavior>
Site Speed) with a mobile advanced segment to identify any speed issues on the pages with the highest mobiles pageviews and prioritize
page speed optimization for these pages.
If you find that you need to completely redesign your website to ensure mobile-friendliness, make sure to check out the following resources: