Month: September 2015

Google Mobile Friendliness and App Banners

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Google have just posted about new update to mobile friendliness indicating that in order to provide good user experience on mobile devices app install interstitial can not any longer cover/hide significant amount of the on-page content.

“Starting today, we’ll be updating the Mobile-Friendly Test to indicate that sites should avoid showing app install interstitial that hide a significant amount of content on the transition from the search result page. The Mobile Usability report in Search Console will show webmasters the number of pages across their site that have this issue.”

In terms of the timeline for this update Google says that after November 1 any mobile web page that show an app install interstitial that hides a significant amount of content on the transition from the search result page will no longer be considered as mobile-friendly.

Google won’t punish sites using the standard app install banners in Chrome and Safari; this is aimed at the huge annoying overlays purposely blocking access to the desired content.

Source: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.uk/2015/09/mobile-friendly-web-pages-using-app.html

HTTPS Content Mismatch Errors May Not Earn Ranking Boost

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In recent August 28th Google hangout on Google+, John Mueller indicated a very important fact by saying at 18:30 mark that Google may not give HTTPS web pages the desired HTTPS ranking boost in case the page serves up HTTPS content mismatch errors.

What does it actually mean? It’s relatively simple, when your web page uses HTTPS protocol but somehow there are some elements on the page that are not secure e.g. images not over HTTPS or any social media plugins etc.
So far Google has been quite liniment and your pages might have benefited from move to HTTPS, even if they are not fully HTTPS secure.

However according to John Mueller this may change moving forward;

I imagine at some point, we will say you will have to serve really clean HTTPS for us to show that in the search results. I don’t know. I don’t think that there will be any kind of penalty around that. Just that we may say, we won’t count this as HTTPS, so it won’t get that small HTTPS ranking boost.

Summarising, think twice when planning to move to HTTPS as many of my industry piers have been already noticing site visibility drops after move to HTTPS even despite keeping all clean and tidy in the process. I’m still of the opinion that there always should be strong business case to support move to HTTPS rather that doing it for the sake of compliance with Google’s advice.