Ever been out and desperately needed some information, searched it on your smartphone, found a promising looking result only to be redirected to the sites mobile-friendly home page? Well, no more says Google!

Google has announced that they will now be monitoring mobile redirects to continue to deliver high quality results to end users. These sites will not be penalized in their rankings, but will rather be shown on SERPs with an additional line stating “May open the site’s homepage”.

Google wants to make sure that webmasters are able to avoid this and have given us three steps to prevent this from happening to your site:

1. Test this on your smartphone
2. Check your Google Webmaster Tools account for a “faulty redirect” crawl error
3. Investigate and fix faulty redirects:

• “Use the example URLs we provide in Webmaster Tools as a starting point to debug exactly where the problem is with your server configuration.”
• “Set up your server so that it redirects smartphone users to the equivalent URL on your smartphone site.”
• “If a page on your site doesn’t have a smartphone equivalent, keep users on the desktop page, rather than redirecting them to the smartphone site’s homepage. Doing nothing is better than doing something wrong in this case.”
• “Try using responsive web design, which serves the same content for desktop and smartphone users.”

– Google Webmaster Central Blog
Make sure that your website is showing up correctly and directing properly for all landing pages on mobile search engines. If you have seen websites showing this message, let us know in the comments below.

About The Author

Shiri brings her knowledge in online marketing and social media, among other things to the Rank Ranger team. She’s excited to be a Ranger and looks forward to wearing the ranger hat and getting her sheriff’s badge in the SEO force.