Tag Archive for: mobile

Google begins sending notifications about mobile-first indexing

, , , , ,

Google is sending emails to webmasters that are being migrated to the search engine’s new mobile-first index. If your site gets indexed, Google will start choosing the mobile version of your site as the default choice – meaning your site is fast enough and optimized for mobile users.

The search engine first said they would start sending notifications to websites being migrated into the mobile-first index, but the emails have only started being actually seen in the wild over the past few days.

The notifications are coming a bit late, considering Google has confirmed that it began moving websites over to the mobile-first index months ago.

You can see a copy of the email as shared by The SEM Post or read the full text below:

”Mobile-first indexing enabled for <URL>

To owner of <URL>

This means that you may see more traffic in your logs from Googlebot Smartphone. You may also see that snippets in Google Search results are now generated from the mobile version of your content.

Background: Mobile-first indexing means that Googlebot will now use the mobile version of your site for indexing and ranking, to better help our (primarily mobile) users find what they’re looking for. Google’s crawling, indexing, and ranking systems have historically used the desktop version of your site’s content, which can cause issues for mobile searchers when the desktop version differs from the mobile version. Our analysis indicates that the mobile and desktop versions of your site are comparable.”

/0 Comments

Google launches two new tools showing how your site compares to your competition

, , ,

Google has been banging the drum for speeding up mobile websites for what seems like forever now, and they’ve released numerous tools to try to help webmasters do just that. This week, at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, the search engine announced two more resources to show websites how they are performing – a new “Mobile Scorecard” and Conversion Impact Calculator.

The tools present marketers and webmasters with visual-heavy depictions of how their website stacks up to the competition and what they may be missing out on by not being quicker to load pages

Google’s Mobile Scorecard

The Mobile Scorecard uses data from the Chrome User Experience Report to compare the speed of several sites on mobile. This allows you to directly compare your site against your closest competitors in a race for the fastest website. According to Google, the Mobile Scorecard can give information on thousands of sites across 12 countries.

Even if you’re the leader of the pack, Google recommends making sure your site loads and becomes usable within five seconds on most mobile devices and within three seconds on 4G connections.

Google Conversion Impact Calculator

Of course, the biggest thing keeping most businesses from enhancing their websites for mobile devices is money. To help sway you towards making the investment, Google is launching the new Impact Calculator which shows how much revenue you could be missing out on because of a slow loading speed.

The calculator uses data from The State of Online Retail Performance report from April 2017. This report found that every second it takes for your web pages to load can hurt conversions by up to 20 percent.

The tool calculates your potential lost conversion revenue based on your average monthly visitors, average order value, and conversion rate.

Both the Mobile Scorecard and Impact Calculator are available to check out here.

/0 Comments

Google’s Mobile-First Index Won’t Include AMP Pages

, , , ,

Google has already begun rolling out its mobile-first index to some users, but there are still a lot of questions about how exactly the search engine’s new separate index actually functions.

One such question got a surprising answer yesterday during the Google State of Search conference, as Maile Ohye told the audience that Google won’t index the AMP version of your page in the mobile search index – even when you don’t have a mobile-friendly alternative.

Google’s Gary Illyes also confirmed the news on Twitter after the conference:

That means if you’ve been using AMP pages as an alternative to making your website mobile-friendly, the search engine will skip over indexing your AMP pages in the mobile-friendly search index. Instead, it will by default choose to index the desktop version within its older index.

There is a way to force Google to index your AMP pages in this situation using a rel alternate attribute, but otherwise Google’s index will default to your desktop versions of pages.

This is particularly surprising because Google has pushed AMP as the ultimate way to deliver content to mobile users quickly and without losing ad revenue. But, in this case it seems the streamlined design of AMP pages leaves something to be desired. It may be the lack of site navigation options is what made Google decide to favor desktop over AMP in their index.

This change will most likely only affect a very small number of websites, but it is an odd choice for the search engine. The vast majority of websites who have adopted AMP also maintain a mobile version of their site.

/0 Comments

Accelerated Mobile Pages Now Support Forms

, , ,

accelerated-mobile-pages

The Accelerated Mobile Pages project says it has made its stripped-down superfast mobile pages even more versatile with the ability to support forms in AMP HTML.

AMP uses a simplified version of HTML to provide pages faster than usually possible on mobile devices – where speed matters most to users. However, the format offers limited features compared to full-fledged web pages. Until now, one of those limitations was the lack of ability to include forms.

Now, AMP users can include everything from the standard e-mail address capture form to more complex forms or even interactive polls. In addition to making it easier to communicate or gain information from your visitors, the support for forms can help with allowing customers to select colors or other details on e-commerce product pages.

form-error

As the AMP project says in its announcement, support for forms “enables building experiences ranging from a product color picker on an e-commerce detail page to an email field to capture newsletter signups to an interactive poll to engage readers within an article.”

If you want to start running your own AMP pages to deliver content faster to on-the-go users or you want to start adding forms to your already existing accelerated mobile pages, check out the AMP project’s official guides and documentation.

You can also see live examples of what the forms may look like on your site at AMP by Example.

The AMP project says it plans to continue to expand the functionality of AMP pages and AMP forms based on user feedback, but the overall focus is still on providing functional and engaging web pages to users as fast as possible.

/0 Comments

Worldwide Mobile Internet Usage Eclipses Desktop For The First Time

, , ,

Mobile Internet Usage

Mobile internet usage has been steadily gaining ground for years, and just last month it hit another milestone. According to a press release issued yesterday from StatCounter, mobile and tablet internet usage has finally exceeded total desktop usage for the first time ever.

Last month, mobile and tablet devices made up 51.3% of total internet usage compared to 48.7% by desktop. This is the first time worldwide monthly mobile internet usage has overtaken desktop according to StatCounter’s measure.

mobileusage

It is almost guaranteed this trend will continue in the long-term, but the short-term gains may not hold up. Mobile web usage has historically increased leading up to the holiday season and may deflate in the first part of next year. Even if this happens, the new milestone shows mobile usage is still consistently growing and will likely be the dominant way to access the web in the coming years.

Aodhan Cullen, CEO of StatCounter, says the new numbers should show businesses how important it is to make mobile a priority now, rather than later:

“This should be a wake up call especially for small businesses, sole traders and professionals to make sure that their websites are mobile friendly. Many older websites are not.”

Of course, mobile usage varies by country. While major markets like the US and the UK still primarily rely on desktop computers. Emerging markets like India overwhelmingly use mobile devices for internet usage and show no signs of slowing down.

/0 Comments

Google’s Latest Tool Lets You Test and Preview AMP Pages

, , ,

In the wake of the one-year anniversary of the release of AMP (accelerated mobile pages), Google has released a new testing tool to help content publishers ensure their AMP pages are properly set-up and displaying correctly.

The tool is directly available at https://search.google.com/search-console/amp and can be accessed through the Google Search Console.

The testing tool is designed to work on mobile devices and uses Google’s live web-search infrastructure” to assess any AMP page using real Googlebots to provide real-time evaluations.

Specifically, it checks the AMP markup and structured data on the page for issues, then highlights any part of the source-code that could be creating errors. You can then click on the issues for more details about the issue.

The testing tool also allows you to see a live preview of how the page may appear in Google’s search results.

Below you can see screenshots of the tool in action, taken by Barry Schwartz:

google-amp-testing-tool-614x600

google-amp-preview-tool

/0 Comments

Instant Articles Now Available For All Facebook Publishers

, , , , ,

Instant Articles

Facebook is bringing its Instant Articles to all developers and content producers. The social media platform has been slowly testing its feature, which allows publishers to share content on Facebook mobile that is fast-loading and easy to read.

During Facebook’s F8 conference, the company announced that publishers of any size or kind can now publish via Instant Articles while also sharing some statistics showing how Instant Articles have been performing so far.

According to Facebook’s data, Instant Articles leads to

  • 20% more clicks on links to content
  • 70% reduced likelihood of abandoning content once clicking on it.
  • 30% more shares compared to the average mobile web articles.

Instant Articles are Facebook’s response to Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages and other fast-loading content platforms that streamline pages to ensure they load almost instantaneously on mobile devices. Facebook’s Instant Articles are unique though, because they also allow publishers to control ad placements within their content.

Publishers can even publish native ads as Instant Articles, which are distinguished from traditional content through unique styling options and the ability to add your company’s logo.

“Facebook’s goal is to connect people to the stories, posts, videos or photos that matter most to them,” the company says. “Opening up Instant Articles will allow any publisher to tell great stories, that load quickly, to people all over the world. With Instant Articles, they can do this while retaining control over the experience, their ads and their data.”

/0 Comments

Accelerated Mobile Pages Are Rolling Out Across Google

, , ,

Google Mobile

Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) have been rumored to rollout in late February for some time, and it appears they are finally starting to appear. The AMP listings are being spotted in mobile search results, but it seems they are not available for all searchers.

Accelerated Mobile Pages are pages designed to be super lightweight and allow for incredibly fast load times. It does this by using a unique, streamlined version of HTML that is able to be heavily caches to provide the fastest loading experience possible.

To see if you have access to the new AMP search results, just perform a search on Google.com for any query that would typically trigger a news box. If you can’t think of anything, you can try ‘Trump’, ‘Google’, or ‘Obama’.

Barry Schwartz shared a few screencaps of what you can expect to see as the listings become more widely available. You can see them below:

google-amp-live

This screencap shows AMP listings appearing in the news listings, rather than the carousel:

google-amp-non-carousel

/0 Comments

Google Has The Slowest Loading Mobile Home Page In Its Market

, , ,

mobile-closeup-campaign

Google has been vocal lately about encouraging webmasters to improve the loading speed of their websites, especially on mobile devices. It has made loading speed one of its many ranking signals and is rolling out Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) to improve mobile website speed.

With all this effort to make mobile loading speed an important issue for webmaster, you might think Google would be ahead of the curve when it comes to making sure their pages load quickly on mobile devices. Not so, according to a recent test shared on Hacker News.

The test was conducted using Google’s own PageSpeed Insights tool and several others have replicated the results on their own. The findings seem clear; Google is the slowest loading home page on mobile in its market.

You can see the results of some of the speed tests below:

Screen-Shot-2016-02-20-at-3.21.33-PM-760x276

Google’s loading speed

DuckDuckGo's loading speed

DuckDuckGo’s loading speed

Screen-Shot-2016-02-20-at-3.22.53-PM-760x256

Bing’s loading speed

Screen-Shot-2016-02-20-at-3.23.41-PM-760x257

Yahoo’s loading speed

Somewhat surprising, Yahoo came out ahead of the pack with a loading speed significantly faster than anyone else in the market. That may be part of the reason Yahoo has seen faster growth on mobile than Bing or other alternatives to Google. However, Yahoo’s market share of mobile search still sits at just over 3.5% compared to Google’s 94%.

Several elements are slowing down Google’s mobile home page, including render-blocking JavaScript and CSS in above-the-fold content. Once AMP is rolled out, this could change. If Accelerated Mobile Pages are as effective as Google claims, it should have one of the fasted loading home pages on mobile once the new system is released. But, it is interesting that Google is currently lagging behind the field.

/0 Comments