Dumb SEO Questions

(Entry was posted by David Jones on this post in the Dumb SEO Questions community on Facebook, 01/21/2015).

New warnings from Google regarding mobile usability for sites

I have been reading about the new warnings from Google regarding mobile usability for sites, right now I have no direct warnings from Google in WMT about my sites but decided to check some that I have deployed a new responsive theme to with the mobile usability tool.

I have this new theme on 4 sites and 3 have no or very few warnings (less than 10 out of thousands of pages) but one site Forevergeek DOT com it says that 1, 296 pages have problems with `content not sized to view port` and `touch elements too close`. The former part definitely is not true as this theme was built with mobile in mind and works perfectly on mobile and tablets and is fully responsive, I also tested some of these pages that Google said were a problem using their own page insights tool and they all got 99/100 scores for UX.

However they also all got very poor scores of less than 50/100 for page speed issues but this is nothing to do with the two warnings given in WMT for mobile usability.

Im going to try and improve the page load times but what should I do about the other warnings regarding content size for viewports and touch elements? I dont see how I can improve things any more on this site in question.

Also these are 3 other sites all running the exact same theme but when I tested these for mobile usability Google said only a handful of pages had problems or that they were all fine...

socialnewsdaily dot com
thedailymind dot come
celebrific dot com?
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YOUR ANSWERS

Selected answers from the Dumb SEO Questions Facebook & G+ community.

  • David Jones: I have been reading about the new warnings from Google regarding mobile usability for sites, right now I have no direct warnings from Google in WMT about my sites but decided to check some that I have deployed a new responsive theme to with the mobile usability tool.

    I have this new theme on 4 sites and 3 have no or very few warnings (less than 10 out of thousands of pages) but one site Forevergeek DOT com it says that 1,296 pages have problems with 'content not sized to view port' and 'touch elements too close'. The former part definitely is not true as this theme was built with mobile in mind and works perfectly on mobile and tablets and is fully responsive, I also tested some of these pages that Google said were a problem using their own page insights tool and they all got 99/100 scores for UX.

    However they also all got very poor scores of less than 50/100 for page speed issues but this is nothing to do with the two warnings given in WMT for mobile usability.

    Im going to try and improve the page load times but what should I do about the other warnings regarding content size for viewports and touch elements? I dont see how I can improve things any more on this site in question.

    Also these are 3 other sites all running the exact same theme but when I tested these for mobile usability Google said only a handful of pages had problems or that they were all fine...

    socialnewsdaily dot com
    thedailymind dot come
    celebrific dot com
  • Mark Steenbakkers: Hi +David Jones , do you use different plugins, extensions on this particular site? I checked your website in the W3C HTML Validator and CSS Validator and both reports show a lot of errors. I recommend fixing these errors and check if you still get the same warnings.

    W3C CSS Validator
    http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/validator?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.forevergeek.com%2F&profile=css3&usermedium=all&warning=1&vextwarning=&lang=en

    W3C HTML Validator:
    http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.forevergeek.com%2F&charset=%28detect+automatically%29&doctype=Inline&group=0

    PS: It looks like your using Lazy Load or a similar plugin to load your content. Content loaded via Ajax does not get index by Google directly, you need to create HTML snapshots in order to get your content indexed.

    http://webmasters.stackexchange.com/questions/56070/impact-of-using-lazy-loading-on-seo

View original question in the Dumb SEO Questions community on Facebook, 01/21/2015).