A couple of months ago, Google warned webmasters that they would be showing an alert in the Google search results to mobile users who were attempting to go to an internal page of a website but the website itself redirects all mobile users to the homepage instead. Now, Google has started sending letters to websites who are forwarding mobile users to the homepage.
Marie Haynes of HIS Web Marketing was the first to notice the new alert. It was emailed to all users registered to the account and there was also a notice within Google Webmaster Tools. Nothing showed up as a crawl alert error or in HTML improvements area of GWT.
It is good that Google is starting to alert webmasters to this, as people are still surprised when they learn how their site is handling mobile traffic. Webmasters should be careful that they aren’t hijacking a mobile user’s intent by sending them to the homepage, as it is a very poor user experience – not to mention a pet peeve of many mobile users.
Added: Marie tweeted today that it is now showing up in the crawl errors section as well.
Jennifer Slegg
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[…] is a very dominant force in search and the search share continues to rise. In August, Google began warning webmasters when their sites were redirecting mobile users to the homepage, as opposed to the internal page […]