Mixed signals about mobile usability

[Dani]

As we all know, Google is going to start factoring in mobile usability into their algorithm later this month.

Over the past few days, out of no where, Google Webmaster Tools started showing an increasing number of mobile usability issues (first 124 earlier this week, and now 268 pages with content not sized to viewport and touch elements too close). I'm afraid this number is only going to increase!

However, for each of the links, if I click 'check live version' it says the page is mobile friendly.

Is this something to worry about???

[rtrethewey]

It sounds like a data glitch in WMT, which is not a terribly unusual occurance. Check the 'Last Detected' dates shown for the individual errors and I bet they're reports from crawls done months ago. It seems to me that Google hasn't quite gotten a crawl schedule worked out for Googlebot Mobile that increases the crawl rate for pages that show problems despite a falling error rate for the site as a whole. For the accounts I manage, for example, the errors I see are largely for pages that don't normally merit frequent crawls (low PageRank, deeply-buried, rarely changing, etc.) anyway.

Between that and the fact that Mobile crawls seem slow/shallow to begin with, the result is that changes to those pages aren't detected for a very long time and the error reports persist. In your case, the report doesn't make sense. It sounds like the data is stale - perhaps from a back-up, or just a Googlebug - and the effects are probably limited to WMT and not the active index data. I don't think there's much to be done about it. As long as you know the pages are mobile-friendly, I'd let it go.

[Dani]

Check the 'Last Detected' dates shown for the individual errors and I bet they're reports from crawls done months ago.

No, the dates indicate within the past week. Meanwhile, we've been mobile friendly for well over a year. No changes to our responsive CSS anytime recently.

[danielmav]

Even We have got the same message from Google webmaster related to mobile friendly of our website. Our website is mobile friendly too.

I guess this is the general message Google has sent to each webmaster.

[rtrethewey]

I'm still leaning toward a data glitch. I'd be more confident if I was seeing other similar reports online, but I can't think of any other reasonable explanation. Google always massages and filters search data before funneling it into WMT, and the process is often problematic.

The only thing you can do to try to help the process would be to use the "Fetch As Googlebot" tool (set to "Mobile Smartphone", "Fetch and Render", and select the option for crawling connected pages, followed by "Submit to Index". Do that on some directory-level URLs that include a significant number of the problem pages. You're going to run into some daily submission limits, I'm sure, but it should give you some indications on how much to trust or distrust the WMT error messages. You'll probably have to wait 3-4 days to see any changes in the report, but... it is what it is. Good luck!

[rtrethewey]

One last thing: there's an acid test available. Do an inurl: search for any of these pages using a smartphone or an emulator and look for Google's "Mobile Friendly" label. You don't even really need a smartphone. If you use Chrome, you can use the emulator in the F12 Developer's Tools. Works a charm for this purpose. Just type the query into the address bar.

[Dani]

Strangely, the number of pages with mobile issues dropped down to only 7 as of today. Almost as creepily as first appeared.