Webmaster Central Blog
Official news on crawling and indexing sites for the Google index
Promoting modern websites for modern devices in Google search results
Monday, July 14, 2014
Webmaster level: all
A common annoyance for web users is when websites require browser technologies that are not supported by their device. When users access such pages, they may see nothing but a blank space or miss out a large portion of the page's contents.
Starting today in our English search results in the US, we will indicate to searchers when our algorithms detect pages that may not work on their devices. For example, Adobe Flash is not supported on iOS devices or on Android versions 4.1 and higher, and a page whose contents are mostly Flash may be noted like this:
Developing modern multi-device websites
Fortunately, making websites that work on all modern devices is not that hard: websites can use HTML5 since it is universally supported, sometimes exclusively, by all devices. To help webmasters build websites that work on all types of devices regardless of the type of content they wish to serve, we recently
announced
two resources:
Web Fundamentals
: a curated source for modern best practices.
Web Starter Kit
: a starter framework supporting the Web Fundamentals best practices out of the box.
By following the best practices described in Web Fundamentals you can build a
responsive web design
, which has long been
Google's recommendation
for search-friendly sites. Be sure not to block crawling of any Googlebot of the page assets (CSS, JavaScript, and images) using robots.txt or otherwise. Being able to access these external files fully helps our algorithms detect your site's responsive web design configuration and treat it appropriately. You can use the
Fetch and render as Google
feature in Webmaster Tools to test how our indexing algorithms see your site.
As always, if you need more help you can ask a question in
our webmaster forum
.
Posted by Keita Oda, Software Engineer, and
Pierre Far
, Webmaster Trends Analyst
Hey! Rankings in mobile search results changed
April 21st, 2015
.
Check here if your site is mobile-friendly.
Labels
accessibility
10
advanced
193
AMP
2
API
2
apps
6
autocomplete
2
beginner
171
crawling and indexing
141
encryption
1
events
44
feedback and communication
74
general tips
81
geotargeting
1
Google+
1
hacked sites
8
hreflang
3
https
2
images
6
intermediate
204
interstitials
1
localization
21
malware
3
mobile
41
mobile-friendly
5
performance
11
products and services
57
search console
9
search queries
4
search results
105
security
5
sitemaps
43
structured data
11
TLDs
1
url removals
1
UX
1
verification
7
video
1
webmaster community
5
webmaster guidelines
44
webmaster tools
159
Archive
2016
Aug
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Jan
2015
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2014
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2013
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2012
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2011
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2010
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2009
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2008
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2007
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2006
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Feed
Google
on
Follow @googlewmc
Give us feedback in our
Product Forums
.
Subscribe via email
Enter your email address:
Delivered by
FeedBurner
Hey! Rankings in mobile search results changed April 21st, 2015.
