Google Showing Incorrect Versions of Mobile Pages

Posted: March 11, 2007

When one does a search on mobile.google.com and then clicks on a result, Google is changing the site owner’s website.Â When the site has a mobile compliant pages, Google is still displaying their version to the searcher - not the website owner’s mobile version.

Google’s rendering is much worse than my site’s mobile view. In these instances, Google needs to let me (or any mobile site owner) opt out of having their content displayed in a way that was unapproved by the site owner.

Here’s a look at Google’s rendering of this website’s home page:

Here’s the version a user would see if Google didn’t change it:

Which looks better for a user?

I’d have to vote for my view.

I’m using a low tech wordpress plug-in (with some modifications) that does a browser detect (which includes phone types) to determine to serve the HTML or Mobile page. Hence, I don’t make users remember a mobile versus a PC URL (and they shouldn’t have to).

Serving mobile pages should be the same as doing a browser detect for flash (and speed) and then serving a flash or HTML version of a page.

Google is crawling the web looking for mobile pages. While that may be step one in building a mobile search product, step two is understanding what sites have mobile pages and letting users see the best page.

Mobile growth will be dependent on:

data quality
search experience
website adoption

In this instance, all three exist. Google needs to let site owners have control of their content so that users can have good mobile experiences.

View your site through mobile eyes:

To see what your site looks like to Google searchers, visit Google’s mobile proxy.

To see what your site looks like on a smart phone you can download Windows 2003 Pocket PC Emulator or Windows 2003 SE Smartphone Emulator.

Share and Enjoy:

Related Information:

« Google AdWords Change History Tool

Optimizing Your 404 Error Page »

Written by Brad Geddes aka eWhisper · Filed Under Blog, Mobile

Comments

One Response to “Google Showing Incorrect Versions of Mobile Pages”

Mike on March 15th, 2007 12:23 pm

Have you looked at this posting:
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35312

from Google’s help site. It should allow web site owners to control their content in a standards compliant way.