Big Mobile Trouble On Horizon For Big-Name Brands

15 of the globe’s top 100 brands aren’t ‘Mobile-friend­ly’, accord­ing to Google.

Danny Goodwin By Danny Goodwin from Momentology. Join the discussion » 0 comments

Smart brands rec­og­nize the impor­tance of being mobile-friend­ly. They know con­sumers are increas­ing­ly using mobile through­out the pur­chase jour­ney and will aban­don bad mobile sites. Google also rec­og­nizes the impor­tance of mobile, recent­ly adding a “Mobile-friend­ly” label to its search results, with a sig­nif­i­cant mobile search rank­ing update on the hori­zon tomor­row (April 21), which will pass or fail pages on a page-by-page basis. Which got us to think­ing – just how mobile-friend­ly are the biggest glob­al brands?


We looked at Google’s mobile search results for the top 100 glob­al brands, as ranked by Inter­brand, to see which sites’ home pages have received a “Mobile-friend­ly” label from Google. Mobile SEO Now Banner

Eighty-five per­cent of brands passed the test. This includes names you’d expect to be mobile-friend­ly – includ­ing Apple, Coca-Cola, Microsoft, Face­book, and Google itself.

But for the 15 brands that didn’t earn a “Mobile-friend­ly” label, we used Google’s Mobile-Friend­ly Test tool to see why Google failed to give them the des­ig­na­tion.

What’s inter­est­ing is that a few of the brands that failed to earn the “Mobile-friend­ly” label actu­al­ly were mobile-friend­ly, accord­ing to Google’s own tool! So what gives? Let’s look at all the results.

Mobile-Friendly Sites That Didn’t Earn Google’s ‘Mobile-Friendly’ Label

When it comes to reward­ing mobile-friend­ly sites, we found Google isn’t entire­ly accu­rate.

Four mobile-friend­ly sites failed to earn Google’s “Mobile-friend­ly” des­ig­na­tion. Yet, after test­ing the home pages of Kellogg’s, Pana­son­ic, John­nie Walk­er, and Piz­za Hut with Google’s Mobile Friend­ly Test tool, Google report­ed those sites actu­al­ly were mobile-friend­ly.

What’s the deal? Why haven’t these brands that obvi­ous­ly have invest­ed in mobile received the mobile-friend­ly label?

Turns out, there are a cou­ple of rea­sons why Google says it doesn’t give pages the “mobile-friend­ly” des­ig­na­tion:

  • Google’s crawlers haven’t yet rein­dexed the mobile-friend­ly ver­sion of the page. Google’s test­ing tool checks pages in real-time, so it might be the case that the tool is ahead of Google’s crawlers.
  • The web­site is block­ing resources Google needs to ren­der the page.

If you have recent­ly con­vert­ed a page to be more friend­ly, yet Google isn’t rec­og­niz­ing it, what can you do?

Accord­ing to Jen­nifer Slegg, writ­ing at The SEM­Post, you can do the fol­low­ing:

  • Use the fetch and sub­mit func­tion in Google Web­mas­ter Tools.
  • If you have a cat­e­go­ry page that leads to all of the low­er-lev­el pages in that sec­tion, then “you can sub­mit that page and say this page and all the linked pages should be recrawled as soon as pos­si­ble.”
  • Last­ly, you can also set up a sitemap file and sub­mit it to Google with all the changes made recent­ly, essen­tial­ly telling Google “I updat­ed my whole web­site, it has a new change date on it and Google will try to use that as well to speed up crawl­ing of those pages.

Disallowed by Robots.txt

Two brands, IBM and Gap, failed to earn the “Mobile-friend­ly” label on their home pages because their URLs redi­rect to mobile sites (http://m.ibm.com/us/ and http://m.gap.com/browse/home.do, respec­tive­ly) that were dis­al­lowed by their robots.txt files, accord­ing to Google’s tool.

Because these brands used their robots.txt file to restrict­ed Google’s abil­i­ty to access their sites, any­one who search­es for either brand will see this mes­sage in the search results: “A descrip­tion for this result is not avail­able because of this site’s robots.txt.”

To find out if your site is hav­ing this same issue, do a mobile search for your brand on Google. If you see this mes­sage, the fix is sim­ple: update your robots.txt file.

Not Mobile-Friendly

Nine of the 100 home­pages of brands we looked at failed the mobile-friend­ly test. The rea­sons for that fail­ure dif­fered slight­ly from brand to brand – some mobile sites failed due to poor usabil­i­ty, while oth­ers failed due to block­ing resources Google needs to ren­der the page accu­rate­ly. And shock­ing­ly, some of these giant brands have no mobile web­site at all!

So which brands are mobile-fail­ures?

Nike

Nike mobile fail

Why it failed:

  • Text too small to read.
  • Links too close togeth­er.
  • Mobile view­port not set.

Sports brand Nike has a sep­a­rate mobile site (m.nike.com), but sim­ply hav­ing a mobile site isn’t enough to be “mobile-friend­ly” by Google’s def­i­n­i­tion. “Just do it” … wrong.

Canon

Canon mobile fail

Why it failed:

  • Text too small to read.
  • Links too close togeth­er.
  • Mobile view­port not set.

Canon, a man­u­fac­tur­er of cam­eras and acces­sories, has opt­ed with going “unre­spon­sive”, forc­ing a web­site designed for desk­tops on mobile con­sumers. “Delight­ing you always” … as long as you aren’t a mobile user.

Nescafe

Nescafe mobile fail

Why it failed:

  • Text too small to read.
  • Links too close togeth­er.
  • Mobile view­port not set.
  • Uses incom­pat­i­ble plu­g­ins.

Like Canon, Nescafe is serv­ing its mobile-unfriend­ly desk­top home page. That plu­g­in issue? Flash. Wel­come to the non-mobile world of Nescafe.

Siemens

Siemens mobile fail

Why it failed:

  • Con­tent wider than screen.
  • Links too close togeth­er.

This is a bit of an odd one. Siemens has a sep­a­rate mobile site (m.siemens.com/) that doesn’t get a “Mobile-friend­ly” label when doing a Google search on Android, but the same home page gets a “Mobile-friend­ly” label when search­ing on an iPhone.

Despite pass­ing or fail­ing in the search results depend­ing on the device, it still fails Google’s test for the above two rea­sons. I’m not see­ing the “con­tent wider than screen” issue on either of the smart­phones used for this test­ing. Good luck, Siemens!

AXA

AXA mobile fail

Why it failed:

  • Text too small to read.
  • Links too close togeth­er.
  • Mobile view­port not set.
  • Con­tent wider than screen.

Although finan­cial brand AXA has opt­ed for respon­sive design, Google is accu­rate in its assess­ment. This site needs some good advice about its design.

Nestle

Nestle mobile fail

Why it failed:

  • Text too small to read.
  • Mobile view­port not set.
  • Links too close togeth­er.
  • Con­tent wider than screen.

Food and bev­er­age brand Nes­tle fails here. But it looks like what Google’s tool is see­ing is dif­fer­ent from what I’m see­ing. Blame Nes­tle for some bad mobile SEO.

The cul­prit seems to be 17 resources that couldn’t be loaded. The fact that Google can’t access the resources it needs to ren­der the page means Nes­tle gets a fail­ing grade. Nes­tle should eas­i­ly receive a “Mobile-friend­ly” label once the brand allows Google access to those resources.

DHL

DHL Mobile fail

Why it failed:

  • Text too small to read.
  • Links too close togeth­er.
  • Mobile view­port not set.
  • Con­tent wider than screen.

Glob­al logis­tics brand DHL sim­ply fails to deliv­er an excel­lent mobile expe­ri­ence, instead giv­ing mobile users a web­site designed for the desk­top.

MasterCard

MasterCard mobile fail

Why it failed:

  • Links too close togeth­er.
  • Text too small to read.
  • Mobile view­port not set.
  • Con­tent wider than screen.

There are some things mon­ey can’t buy – and one of them is appar­ent­ly a mobile web­site for cred­it card giant Mas­ter­Card. Here is yet anoth­er brand giv­ing a web­site designed for desk­tops to mobile users.

Kleenex

Kleenex mobile fail

Why it failed:

  • Text too small to read.
  • Links too close togeth­er.
  • Mobile view­port not set.

The lack of a mobile site by Kleenex fig­u­ra­tive­ly makes me want to cry.

Conclusion

Users want mobile-friend­ly sites. So do the search engines.

Whether you go with respon­sive design, dynam­ic-serv­ing, or a ded­i­cat­ed mobile site (m.dot), the key is to ensure what­ev­er con­fig­u­ra­tion you choose, do it right. Oth­er­wise, searchers may just start pass­ing your site up in favor of a “mobile-friend­ly” com­peti­tor.

Down­load our Mobile SEO Now ebook to learn every­thing you need to know about con­sumer smart­phone usage, why it’s crit­i­cal to be mobile-friend­ly, and what you need to do to suc­cess­ful­ly opti­mize your web pres­ence for mobile con­sumers.


Does your brand or busi­ness have a “Mobile-friend­ly” label?

Danny Goodwin

Written by Danny Goodwin

Managing Editor, Momentology

Danny Goodwin is the former Managing Editor of Momentology. Previously, he was the editor of Search Engine Watch, where he was in charge of editing, content strategy, and writing about search industry news.

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