Google punishes a big brand in mobile
It was just a few weeks ago that Google started issuing notices about smartphone faulty redirects. Now we’re seeing the warnings increase and sites getting removed from mobile search if they are doing the so called “faulty redirect” .
BigW recently launched a new site and now has at least three sites that I can see. www.bigw.com.au, ebooks.bigw.com.au & m.bigw.com.au. The problem for them having the m.bigw.com.au site is that it has a lot less pages than www.bigw.com.au.
This means that there are not enough equivalent pages on m. to redirect to if someone finds a www page in Google whilst on a mobile. BigW seems to be redirecting all mobile traffic, as you would expect, to a page on m.bigw.com.au.
Google seeing redirection as misdirection.
In the case of mobile search Google does not want its users redirected to another page that does not have exactly the same content. For this reason it is highly unlikely that you will see a www version of a site appear in Google search results if an m. version of the domain exists.
Prepare for a drop in mobile traffic
This will not affect sites that are using responsive design or possibly even those that don’t any mobile version of their site. Unless you have an exact mirror of your www site at your m site you will probably see a drop in traffic as Google begins to remove your www pages from the search results.
Jim’s been here for a while, you know who he is.
