Google now notifies Internet users if the search result will redirect them to a mobile homepage. How should businesses, including those that outsource to the Philippines and other offshore destinations, adjust to the change? Open Access BPO shares some insight regarding the matter.
Have you ever Googled something on your smartphone, and when you clicked one of the links displayed on the search results, you got redirected to the site’s mobile homepage instead of the specific page you originally intended to visit? This faulty redirect, which is common among mobile users, will now be less of a problem, thanks to a recent Google tweak.
Starting with Google US, the search engine will now indicate below each result if the page is optimized for mobile so that smartphone users can avoid getting redirected. They can still, however, click “Try anyway” if they’re fine with the mobile homepage. This is what Mariya Moeva, Google’s Webmaster Trends Analyst said when the update was announced on the company’s official Webmaster Central Blog.
One more improvement that will come along with the warning is a notification that Google will send to non-optimized websites about instances of faulty redirects. Via the Webmaster Tools application, site owners can refer to the “Smartphone Crawl Errors” section to see the detected redirects.
What this means for businesses
The update could affect the websites’ traffic, particularly those that have yet to make their site compatible with mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets. The impact could be mostly negative to such sites, especially today that the majority of online activities are done on mobile platforms. The 2014 Internet Trend Report even stated that the number of people accessing the web via desktop is growing less than 10% every year, while smartphone subscribers are growing strong at 20%.
Companies, including outsourced digital marketers, must start embracing the mobile revolution to keep up with the pace of today’s demanding and media-savvy consumers.
