Mobile-friendly URLs

Updated on 20-October-2016 at 10:16 AM

Business Catalyst End of life announcement - find out more details.

About the new Algorithm

This new update involves additional code standards which make the website mobile-friendly. In other words Google will now promote mobile-friendly sites over none mobile-friendly sites if you search from a mobile device. Websites where the code meets the new requirements will have a new label "Mobile-friendly" next to the site description as shown below :

Mobile-Friendly URL's

In order to check if your sites meet the new requirements Google has created a Mobile-Friendly test analyzer where you can check your site for mobile-friendliness.

Affected areas

  • Affects only search ranking on mobile devices.
  • Affects search results in all languages globally.
  • Applies to individual pages, not entire websites.

Solution to this

  • First and major requirement from Google is that your site has to be responsive.

    • Responsive design is basically a technique that adapts the site layout to the viewing environment by using fluid, proportion-based grids, flexible images and CSS3 media queries.

  • If you have three different versions of the same site , start the website creation from the mobile version as the base version.

    • Apply this technique for the projects that require separate design for all three versions of site eg: Sites created using Adobe Muse

Frequently asked questions:

Questions Answers
Why BC affected when it offers mobile support feature? With Mobile Support enabled you basically create different versions of the site pages with their own HTML structure and that is not responsive design. For these sites I highly recommend making them responsive in order to meet the new requirements and, in addition, it will be easier to maintain one single version of the site.
Can an existing Business Catalyst site be optimized to become mobile-friendly? Yes, however, it depends on the site structure.
  1. If your BC site has a moderate and flexible HTML structure that meets major W3C standards then most likely it can be revised to meet the new requirements without much of an effort.
  2. If not, You may want to create new HTML / CSS code from scratch ( called as re-slicing) and then further re-implementation into Business Catalyst.
Can an existing Business Catalyst site be optimized to become mobile-friendly? This can be simply done by creating an alternate phone page and reformatting the content for the smaller view. By creating a phone version of the page Muse automatically adds the following link to the head of the desktop page to inform Google of the alternate mobile-friendly phone page:
<link media="only screen and (max-device-width: 380px)" rel="alternate" href="http://examplesite.com/.../phone/index.html" />

In addition, Muse automatically adds a redirect to the head of the desktop page such that the browser will redirect to the phone page when viewed from a phone.
Finally, Muse adds the following information to the head of the phone page to inform Google of the relationship between the phone page and the desktop page:
<meta name="viewport" content="width=380"/> 
<link rel="canonical" href="http://examplesite.com/.../index.html"/>