Google and Mobile

April is the Deadline

April has been a month for change in the World Wide Web. Google has made some changes on how you pages will get indexed and standards to go along with that.

It's important to be aware of those changes and how to deal with those. In order to help companies and web masters gain an edge on this change, Google has made a tool to help you.

You can get developer help at https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/mobile-friendly/. This is a site by Google which will analyze your current website.
1. Type in your URL
2. Click the Analyze button
3. Results will display


If your site is mobile friendly, once the analyzing is done, Google will display a message that you are mobile compatible.

If you are not, Google will take this a step further and give you a checklist of things that you can look at to correct. Here is an example of what could display if you are not mobile friendly.

Not mobile-friendly
1. Page appears not mobile-friendly
2. Text too small to read
3. Links too close together
4. Mobile viewport not set
5. Content wider than screen

Google takes it a step further for you and gives you even more help. Here is an example of another section of the results page: How Googlebot sees this page

1. This page uses 64 resources which are blocked by robots.txt.

2. Does this screenshot look incorrect? Learn how to let Googlebot view the page correctly.

This page may appear not mobile-friendly because the robots.txt file may block Googlebot from loading some of the page's resources. Learn how to unblock resources for Googlebot.

If you've made sure Googlebot is not blocked, you can see Pagespeed Insights for more details on detected issues. Learn more about the differences between the two tests.

My opinion is this is a great tool and as a web master we all want our designs to be the best possible. Change sometimes is good as long as you can still think outside the box. :)