Mobile Finder By Monica Yarbrough
Google’s Suggestions for SEO Vary HTTP Header Annotations within the HTML: On desktop page: On mobile page: Media queries
How Mobile Finder Works Use both desktop and mobile useragents Look for: Redirect Different content Different stylesheets Media queries
How Mobile Finder Works Change the url to fit common mobile url patterns ex: m.t-mobile.com
PhantomJs Headless WebKit (browser) Well-known and widely used Used to get the content of a page Takes snapshots of the sites it visits Scriptable with coffeescript or javascript
Web Service Query string with 2 parameters url (required) useragent (optional) agent=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/ (compatible; mediaqueries/1.0; +
Results differing content Mozilla/5.0 (Android; Linux armv7l; rv:9.0) Gecko/ Firefox/9.0 Fennec/ :23:42
Limitations Crashing Inconsistent results Problems executing javascript redirection Falsely fails when it actually gets the content Fails to get url of page accessed Slow
Limitations Client-side Redirects (right) (below)
Analysis Results Accuracy (of 100 random hand-checked results) 96 % accurate overall 1 % inaccurately record not found when there is in fact a mobile version 3 % inaccurately say mobile found when there is not a mobile version
Nytimes desktop vs mobile
Rakuten.co.jp desktop vs mobile
Are Google’s Suggestions Used 28 % found a mobile version following Google’s suggestions 85 % found as having some sort of mobile version
Are Google’s Suggestions Used 28 % found following Google’s suggestions Of the 82% that were found as not following the rules: 93% missing vary HTTP header 89% missing alternate and canonical links
Are Google’s Suggestions Used 28 % found following Google’s suggestions 85 % 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 Result As a whole, mobile web pages do not adhere to Google’s standards There are no truly consistent ways for finding a mobile version of a site