Mobile friendly website and written content

[wettFORM.AT]

When it comes to mobile optimization you have to sort out what you would like to display. I saw some mobile versions of websites where a big part of the written content was excluded but on the desktop version there is a lot of additional text visible. So how do you handle this? What can be excluded on the mobile version and what not? How does this effect the rankings?

[wonderpunter]

If it's on a sub domain then it would be treated as a complete different site, if it's responsive then perhaps the content is there just towards the bottom of the page if using a 2 or 3 column setup?

[wettFORM.AT]

I am talking about a responsive site not a sub-domain. I could see some pages where also at the bottom of the page there is no written content visible. I was wondering if this can change rankings.

[TheGooner]

I understand your question and it's a good one.

In response to Google's demand of 16px font for content, and yet somehow displaying at just 320px wide something has to give. A tidy formated page for 800 to 1000px wide desktop / laptop / tablet is just not going to look good on a 320px wide mini-screen.

- I've created some responsive formats for some pages and done just as you said - dropped content (or hidden it).
- I've created other responsive formats and produced reduced tables (hide columns) as the viewport collapses.

Here is one example :
http://www.goonersguide.com/numbers_...gameID=6006307

Take a look at this page in a full screen browser on a big screen. Now slowly pull in the width of the browser window. You can see how the format tries hard to respond and cascade down the page to fit most reasonable screen sizes.

But eventually (at about 600px) I have to make a change and display a cut down version of the stats.
and even then below about 400px it gets ugly again.

(These stats pages are still a work in progress)

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Now if I view the page source - I can see ALL the code is available to the browser at all stages - so I assume that at this stage google is going to count all the content as being present on the page (which it is).

What it does mean is that the mobile rankings and displays might refer to content that cannot be seen by some mobile devices.

[wettFORM.AT]

Thank you very much for your response. It definitely makes sense to keep all the content in the code and to just adjust the visible part of the mobile page. So in this case the content is still there and search engines should be able to see it. Then I would not expect some changes in the rankings.

Do you have any further suggestions? We are currently working on the responsive version of the page but we are not sure how G will rank all the pages afterwards. Is there a risk or shoun´t we worry about this?

[TheGooner]

Sorry Wettform.AT - but I can't make any statements towards Google. (I'm not pretending to be an SEO "expert")

They are a strange search engine with all sorts of tweaks and artificial restrictions on their search results so ANYTHING is possible.
If you are making major changes to the page then yes it is possible for your ranking to change - good or bad - it's tough to tell.


However, I've made changes to both our stats pages and or preview pages recently to be responsive and we appear to be getting more traffic from Google - whether that's as a result of the changes or completely coincidental I cannot tell. And I have no idea how our rankings changed - for any keyword - I don't bother to look or monitor them as others do. Google's dance is always strange.


What I can suggest is that if you are keeping ALL of the content on the page for the big sized screens then I "think" you should not see major rankings changes. And coding in a responsive manner usually means changing the HTML and dropping several tables for divs - effectively simplifying the code - and giving you a better content to code ratio.

If you do it properly then you should be OK. But it is a change - and change means change.

But changing a high ranking page is always a risk - especially if you have a page that you don't know exactly why it ranks so high - because you may just have hit a magic ratio that matches the Google "magic" metrics. We have a couple of pages that I know get lots of Google visits - lots more than I think they should too - and I will not be touching them with these changes while that persists.

[wonderpunter]

One thing is very probable, if you are not mobile optimized then the chances of your rankings being affected very soon are very likely, I find it annoying myself going to a non optmized site and the talk is sooner or later those pages will drop out of the results of a potential 70% of google search traffic soon "mobile search". I see your site is sports orientated and I have had some good success for mobile signups so who knows you may find that it converts better,,,

[wettFORM.AT]

Thank you for your thoughts on this. Yes we will keep all the content and we will update the whole page. We simply have to do it because the site is not responsive and we hope to get better search traffic. I personally do check all the keywords regularly and I could see some changes and the mobile search is lower than the desktop traffic. I think this is a sign that we have to do something because IMO mobile traffic increases.

[Miles_FTA]

@ Gooner I have to give you a Big Up Sir on all my time on the forum reading and getting to see posts and understand affiliates you seem to take a lot of time out of your days to help guys i think that's awesome so well done affiliates like you deserve praise.

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[TheGooner]

I help where I can Miles ... we are all good at something that we can share ...

And I also appreciate the extra effort that others have made in posts in other subjects where I have no idea - and have learnt a lot.
Over the course of the last 7-8 years I have gained a lot of knowledge here at GPWA - it is a great resource if you put the time in to learn.

[Deano99]

Can't agree more on all of the above. I'm just starting out myself and I have been devouring the forums on here, this thread in particular has been very helpful. I hope to learn as much as I can from GPWA and hopefully give something back when I become successful