Google Webmaster Tools - SmugMug Not Mobile Friendly

printergirl

I'm curious. I just received the following message regarding my website:

"Google systems have tested 2 pages from your site and found that 100% of them have critical mobile usability errors. The errors on these 2 pages severely affect how mobile users are able to experience your website. These pages will not be seen as mobile-friendly by Google Search, and will therefore be displayed and ranked appropriately for smartphone users."

I am on the "new" SmugMug and believe I am set to stretchy, not fixed width. It looks fine on my phone too. Why am I getting this message? Am I missing something?

denisegoldberg

printergirl wrote: »

I am on the "new" SmugMug and believe I am set to stretchy, not fixed width. It looks fine on my phone too. Why am I getting this message? Am I missing something?

I don't know what the trigger point is for that message. Out of curiosity I took a look at your site on my phone.

Holding the phone in portrait mode the combination of your logo, social icons, and menu bar take up more than half of the available vertical space on the phone. Holding the phone in landscape mode the only thing that is visible without scrolling is your logo and social icons. Your content is visible in both modes with scrolling - but I would prefer to see more content higher up on the device.

I would recommend removing the social icons when your site is viewed on a small screen.

--- Denise

printergirl

denisegoldberg wrote: »

I would recommend removing the social icons when your site is viewed on a small screen.

Great idea, thanks! I guess I am just concerned about the prospect of being ranked lower in mobile search.

denisegoldberg

printergirl wrote: »

Great idea, thanks! I guess I am just concerned about the prospect of being ranked lower in mobile search.

There should be a way to resubmit to Google after making a change.

--- Denise

Ferguson

One thing I do is add CSS to turn off certain logos on small width displays, e.g. there are three normally, as the screen gets smaller I drop the left and right, and smaller still I drop the main logo entirely. I also scale the size of the logos and text down as it shrinks. It's easy to do with @Media commands, e.g. as an example (obviously most of this is specific to my site class names).

.LEF_logo { height: 40px; } .LEF_center_logo { display:inline; height:100px; }
.sm-page-widget-nav-toplink, .yui3-menu-lable, .LEF_headlines { font-size: larger; }
@media only screen and (max-width: 2000px) { .sm-page-widget-nav-toplink, .yui3-menu-lable, .LEF_headlines { font-size: initial; } .LEF_logo { height: 30px; } .LEF_center_logo { height: 75px; } }
@media only screen and (max-width: 1290px) { .sm-page-widget-nav-toplink, .yui3-menu-lable, .LEF_headlines { font-size: small; } .LEF_logo { height: 20px; } .LEF_center_logo { height: 50px; } }
@media only screen and (max-width: 1000px) { .sm-page-widget-nav-toplink, .yui3-menu-lable, .LEF_headlines { font-size: smaller; } .LEF_logo { display: none; } .LEF_center_logo { height: 30px; } }
@media only screen and (max-width: 675px) { .sm-page-widget-nav-toplink, .yui3-menu-lable, .LEF_headlines { font-size: smaller; } .LEF_logo { display: none; } .LEF_center_logo { display: none; } }

Andy

Look at the pages that Google mentioned in the alert (on your phone)... I am willing to bet they are not anything to worry about. Even teh g00g13 isn't 100% perfect I got the same errors on some /keyword pages, but they looked perfect on my phone.

divamum

I keep getting an error message when I try to look at mine in the google "tester" - something like "robots.text not allowed". Is that a setting at my end, or smug?

denisegoldberg

divamum wrote: »

I keep getting an error message when I try to look at mine in the google "tester" - something like "robots.text not allowed". Is that a setting at my end, or smug?

In case anyone else runs into this, divamum and I continued the conversation in this thread. The key was setting the Site Visibility settings in Account settings... Discovery... Search tab.

--- Denise

divamum

denisegoldberg wrote: »

In case anyone else runs into this, divamum and I continued the conversation in this thread. The key was setting the Site Visibility settings in Account settings... Discovery... Search tab.

--- Denise

I'll add: I had to go through the "verify ownership" process before those were visible to me (presumably due to a recent custom url change), but as soon as I did that, all the SEO and google visilbility options were there for me to work through.

leftquark

We're currently working on making a few changes to the way SmugMug pages are rendered so the pages will pass the Mobile-Friendly Test. Your sites, when set to stretchy, should display well on mobile devices but we also want to make sure that your sites also pass the Google test and maintain their SEO optimized status. I'll report back when I have more information.

leftquark

We pushed a fix today to help ensure all SmugMug sites pass the Google Mobile Friendly Test. If any of your sites were failing before, they should now pass. Google hasn't released any documentation on what exactly causes the test to fail so if you do see any failures please post here so that we can make additional fixes. Ensuring your sites pass this test and remain on Google Search Results is extremely important to us.

As a reminder, the visual display of your site that Google Renders on their Mobile Friendly Test is not what your visitors will see. Your visitors will continue to see your beautiful, fully customized page. Additionally, all metadata and SEO content remains on the page and will continue to operate nominally.

Ferguson

leftquark wrote: »

We pushed a fix today to help ensure all SmugMug sites pass the Google Mobile Friendly Test.

Thank you. It did fail before, it does pass now.