WebProNews

Tag: Responsive Design

  • Google To Note When Pages May Not Work In Mobile Results

    Google is going to start letting mobile searchers know when results include pages that may not work on their devices. On a device that doesn’t support Flash, for example (which includes iOS and Android versions 4.1 and higher), Google will include a message with the result that says, “Uses Flash. May not work on your device.”

    “A common annoyance for web users is when websites require browser technologies that are not supported by their device,” write Google’s Keita Oda and Pierre Far. “When users access such pages, they may see nothing but a blank space or miss out a large portion of the page’s contents.”

    Here’s what one of the results may look like:

    “Fortunately, making websites that work on all modern devices is not that hard: websites can use HTML5 since it is universally supported, sometimes exclusively, by all devices,” the Googlers say. “To help webmasters build websites that work on all types of devices regardless of the type of content they wish to serve, we recently announced two resources: Web Fundamentals (a curated source for modern best practices); and Web Starter Kit (a starter framework supporting the Web Fundamentals best practices out of the box).”

    You can find Web Fundamentals here. On the site it’s described as a comprehensive resource for multi-device web development. It includes sections on multi-device tools, multi-device layous, forms and user input, images/audio/video, optimising performance, and device access.

    Web Starter Kit is here. From the site, you can download the beta kit, which includes a responsive boilerplate, a style guide, cross-device sync, live browser reloading, performance optimization, a built-in HTTP server, PageSpeed Insights reporting, and Sass support.

    Google also notes that you should not block crawling of any Googlebot of CSS, JavaScript or images with robots.txt or otherwise.

    Image via Google

  • Few Top Web-Only Retailers Are Using Responsive Design

    Few Top Web-Only Retailers Are Using Responsive Design

    The Search Agency looked at the top 100 web-only retailers based on Internet Retailer’s Top 500 list of e-commerce sites in order to evaluate how they’re handling mobile. Specifically, they wanted to see if these sites are more mobile-ready than others.

    They found that a shockingly small amount of them (9) were using responsive design, which is what Google apparently prefers. 59 of them used dedicated mobile sites, and the rest simply used desktop sites.

    “The average load time for all companies was 2.99 seconds, significantly greater than Google’s recommended 1 second,” the firm says. “The average score was only 2.808 out of 5. The companies with the highest scores were Nasty Gal, eBags, and Zazzle.”

    “Sites that ranked higher on the list tended to be more female-oriented businesses,” it adds. “For instance, the highest scoring industries were jewelry, health/beauty, and accessories/apparel.”

    It’s worth noting that Google supports sites with dedicated, separate mobile versions just fine. You can read more about mobile optimized sites from the search engine here.

    You can find the full report here (via MarketingLand).

    Image via Google

  • Matt Cutts Talks Responsive Design Impact On SEO

    Google has put out a new Wembaster Help video. In this one, Matt Cutts discusses responsive design and its impact (or lack thereof) on SEO. He takes on the question:

    Does a site leveraging responsive design “lose” any SEO benefit compared to a more traditional m. site?

    Cutts says, “Whenever you have a site that can work well for regular browsers on the desktop as well as mobile phones, there’s a couple completely valid ways to do it. One is called responsive design, and responsive design just means that the page works totally fine whether you access that URL with a desktop browser or whether you access that URL with a mobile browser. Things will rescale, you know, the page size will be taken into account, and everything works fine. Another way to do it is, depending on the user agent that’s coming, you could do a redirect so that a mobile phone – a mobile smartphone, for example – might get redirected to a mobile dot version of your page, and that’s totally fine as well.”

    He notes that Google has guidelines and best practices here.

    This includes things like having a rel=”canonical” from the mobile version to the desktop version, and stuff like that.

    He continues, “In general, I wouldn’t worry about a site that uses responsive design losing SEO benefit(s) because by definition, you’ve got the same URL, so in theory, if you do a mobile version of your site, if you don’t handle that well and you don’t do the rel=’canonical’ and all those sorts of things, you might, in theory, divide the PageRank between those two pages, but if you’ve got responsive design, everything is handled from one URL, and so the PageRank doesn’t get divided. Everything works fine, so you don’t need to worry about the SEO drawbacks at all.”

    And that’s about the size of it.

  • Google Launches Responsive Ad Units For AdSense

    Google announced on Wednesday that it is launching responsive ad units for AdSense in beta. The units enable publishers to support multiple devices with responsive design web pages by letting them specify the size of the ad that will be served.

    Publishers can simply create the unit, then modify the sample CSS media queries in the new ad code.

    Responsive ad unit

    Responsive ad unit for AdSense

    “Be sure to specify fixed pixel values when setting the width and height of the ad to be served,” notes AdSense product manager Nick Radicevic. “Make sure that the specified width and height match one of our supported ad sizes. Please note that link unit sizes aren’t supported at the moment.”

    “The new ad code is responsive on initial page load only,” Radicevic adds. “Subsequent changes to the ad size, such as a screen orientation change, will not cause a new ad to be displayed. We know that this is an important feature for many of you and we’re currently working to address this.”

    Google has more details about creating the responsive ad units, along with some examples in its help center.

  • Google Talks About Optimizing For Tablets

    If your site isn’t optimized for different devices that people are using, it’s not going to look good for Google when they point users to your site. This is something to keep in mind, when you’re considering optimizing for mobile search and searches from tablets.

    Google wants to provide a good experience to users, and users will not benefit from a site that doesn’t cater to the device they are using, even if the content is there. Google recognizes this, and it seems fairly likely that they will take measures to keep your site from showing up if it’s not optimized. Maybe not your site specifically, but this seems like they kind of thing they’d want to improve upon algorithmically.

    Google suggests using responsive design as a way to ensure that your site looks good across devices. They don’t say it will actually help you in search rankings, but considering Googe’s emphasis on user experience, and the fact that they’re even suggesting it, seems to indicate that this is something they’re paying attention to.

    Google has talked about this a number of times in the past. Here are some steps they provided earlier this year, for example. The next month, they shared more advice. Now, they’re talking about making sure you give tablet users the full-sized web, emphasizing that you should not be showing these users a mobile-specific site.

    “When considering your site’s visitors using tablets, it’s important to think about both the devices and what users expect, say Google’s Pierre Far and Scott Main in a joint blog post. “Compared to smartphones, tablets have larger touch screens and are typically used on Wi-Fi connections. Tablets offer a browsing experience that can be as rich as any desktop or laptop machine, in a more mobile, lightweight, and generally more convenient package. This means that, unless you offer tablet-optimized content, users expect to see your desktop site rather than your site’s smartphone site.”

    “Our recommendation for smartphone-optimized sites is to use responsive web design, which means you have one site to serve all devices,” they write. “If your website uses responsive web design as recommended, be sure to test your website on a variety of tablets to make sure it serves them well too. Remember, just like for smartphones, there are a variety of device sizes and screen resolutions to test.”

    They also note that another approach is to have separate sites for desktops and smartphones, and just to redirect users to the relevant version. Just make sure you’re sending tablet users to the desktop version.

    Still, tablets are coming in a variety of sizes these days. Some of them are getting quite small. Responsive design might be the best bet.

    The two note that they “do not have specific recommendations for building search engine friendly tablet-optimized websites.”