Sites engaged in redirecting the mobile URLs to their homepage will need to rethink revising their strategies since Google has taken a tough stand to penalize those found doing so. Google’s stand in this regard has been clearly explained by the company’s penalty expert Casey Markee. He has indicated that if the sites are depending on mobile-only redirects that guide an original URL just to the home page, they may eventually be penalized. As of now Google is only including a note in the search results. Once Google implements the recent decision in full swing, it shall certainly affect the click through rates of your site. Therefore, it is high time for the site owners to reconsider their stand and do the needful to rectify the strategy as required.

Creating a mobile friendly site is not that easy, rather it is highly challenging in view of the several issues that have to be addressed in the process. In fact, you may understand this better by reading on. If you have ever used Google search on your smart phone and tried landing on a page that you had eagerly wanted to view, and the home page suddenly vanished for no obvious reason, you would have got annoyed naturally. Many comedies have dealt on such annoying situations. The main reason why this happens is due to the fact that the website is not properly configured to handle the requests sent from smartphones and therefore sends you to the smartphone homepage. This is often called ‘faulty redirect’.

The recent initiative by Google is aimed at sparing the users from the frustration resulting from such faulty redirects and also helping the webmasters fix the faulty redirects in the appropriate way. Under cases when the smartphone users have to face faulty redirects instead of being guided to the site they keenly want to pursue, it is to be noted below the result. If the users still would like to proceed to the page, they may click on ‘Try Anyway’. There are a few ideas to direct your audience to the pages they want.

Try using a smartphone or a browser set to simulate a smartphone and explore how your site behaves. Check out the webmasters tools. If Google has to detect that any of your pages are redirecting smartphone users to the homepage, then a message will be sent out. Those faulty redirects that are detected in the smartphone crawl errors will also be listed in the webmaster tills section. It is but your responsibility to investigate the faulty redirects and fix them. You will find some example URLs in the webmaster tools that will help you debug the problem locating it from your server configuration.

You need to set up your server in a way that it automatically redirects smartphone users to the equivalent URL on your smartphone site. In case your site does not have any smartphone equivalent, it is advisable to keep the users on the desktop page instead of redirecting them to the smartphone site’s homepage. The underline here is doing something is better than not doing anything or doing something wrong. The best idea is to implement a responsive web design that can serve the same content for desktop as well as smartphone users.