Mobile Finder

By Monica Yarbrough

Google’s Suggestions for SEOVary HTTP HeaderAnnotations within the HTML:

On desktop page: <link rel=“alternate” media=“only screen and (max-width:

640px)” href=“http://m.example.com/page-1” >On mobile page:

<link rel=“canonical” href=“http://www.example.com/page-1” >Media queries

https://developers.google.com/webmasters/smartphone-sites/

How Mobile Finder WorksUse both desktop and mobile useragentsLook for:

RedirectDifferent contentDifferent stylesheetsMedia queries

How Mobile Finder WorksChange the url to fit common mobile url patterns ex: www.t-mobile.com m.t-mobile.com

PhantomJsHeadless WebKit (browser)Well-known and widely usedUsed to get the content of a pageTakes snapshots of the sites it visitsScriptable with coffeescript or javascript

Web ServiceQuery string with 2 parameters

url (required)useragent (optional)

http://cs.harding.edu/mobilefinder/service.php?url=URL&useragent=USER_AGENT

Default useragent = Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_1 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/532.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0.5 Mobile/8B117 Safari/6531.22.7 (compatible; mediaqueries/1.0; +http://cs.harding.edu)

Results<MobileFinder>

<url>http://www.cnn.com/</url><mobileUrl>http://www.cnn.com/</mobileUrl><reason><code>400</code><message>differing content</message></reason><useragent> Mozilla/5.0 (Android; Linux armv7l; rv:9.0) Gecko/20111216 Firefox/9.0 Fennec/9.0</useragent><timeAccessed>2013-07-20 15:23:42</timeAccessed><error/>

<MobileFinder/>

LimitationsCrashingInconsistent resultsProblems executing javascript redirectionFalsely fails when it actually gets the contentFails to get url of page accessedSlow

LimitationsClient-side Redirectswww.golferen.no/wip4/ (right)www.ng.kz/ (below)

Analysis ResultsAccuracy (of 100 random hand-checked results)

96 % accurate overall1 % inaccurately record not found when there is in fact a

mobile version3 % inaccurately say mobile found when there is not a

mobile version

Nytimes desktop vs mobile

Rakuten.co.jpdesktop vs mobile

Are Google’s Suggestions Used28 % found a mobile version following Google’s

suggestions85 % found as having some sort of mobile version

Are Google’s Suggestions Used28 % found following Google’s suggestionsOf the 82% that were found as not following the rules:

93% missing vary HTTP header89% missing alternate and canonical links

Are Google’s Suggestions Used28 % found following Google’s suggestions85 % found as having some sort of mobile version

Redirect: 35%‘Significantly’ different content: 28%Stylesheets alone: 9%Stylesheets and media queries: 11%Media queries alone: 6%Differing urls (trial and error): 11%

End ResultAs a whole, mobile web pages do not adhere to Google’s

standardsThere are no truly consistent ways for finding a mobile

version of a site