After warning webmasters in early 2014 about the redirect mobile, Google now says it will issue shares, but will also offer Tips on how to clean unwanted mobile redirects.
Google has announced that the company will take action on websites that intentionally or unintentionally have sneaky mobile redirects.
Already in April 2014, Google clarified its stance on sneaky redirects, but now they're giving webmasters a deeper look into these cases. One has to suspect that Google is seeing more and more cases of unwanted and deceptive redirects affecting mobile users.
Vicente Courson and Badr Salmi El Idrissi from Google's Search Quality team said:
Redirecting mobile users to improve their mobile experience (such as redirecting mobile users from example.com/url1 to m.example.com/url1) is often beneficial to them. But surreptitiously redirecting mobile users to different content is bad for user experience and is against Google webmaster guidelines".
The situation may be bad for the user. For example, when the same URL is displayed on search results pages on desktop and mobile, and when a user clicks this result on their computer, the URL opens normally, but when the user clicks in the same result on a smartphone, a redirect occurs to an unrelated URL and a web page. This is a frustrating and sometimes unhealthy situation.
Google understands that sometimes these redirects happen without the webmaster's intention. Usually these things can happen due to bad ads or some hack:
- Advertising programs that redirect mobile users: A script/element installed to display ads and monetize content could redirect mobile users to a completely different site without the webmaster being aware of it.
- Mobile redirect as a result of the site being piracy target: In other cases, if your website has been hacked, a potential result may be a redirect to spam domains only for mobile users.
So Google has given webmasters three ways to detect when this happens, since it often goes unnoticed for a while:
- Check to see if you suffer from redirects when you access your site from a smartphone several times a week.
- Check if your website users complain about this.
- Monitor your users in your site analytics data for unusual behavior or strange changes.
Here are some final tips from Google on mobile retargeting:
it's rape of Google's webmaster guidelines redirect users to a page with the intention of displaying content other than what was made available to the search engine crawler.
To ensure quality search results for our users, Google's Search Quality team may make a decision about such sites, including removing URLs from our index. When we take these types of actions, we send a message to the owner from the site through Search Console. Therefore, make sure you have set up a Search Console account.
Make sure you choose advertisers who are transparent about how they handle user traffic, to avoid mobile retargeting to your own users. If you're interested in building trust in online advertising, you may want to take a look at industry best practices when participating in ad networks.
For example, the trusted accounting group Interactive Advertising Bureau Inventory has quality guides and this is a good starting point to get started. There are many ways to monetize content with mobile solutions that provide a high-quality user experience, make sure you use them.