It’s a good chance that most of the time when you are browsing online, you are using a mobile device. Understanding how to optimize your website for a platform more and more people are using every day is essential in creating a user-friendly experience.
Google Search Console actually provides ways for people to know whether they are dealing with mobile usability issues. Simply login to your account and click on “Mobile Usability” to learn more about whether mobile users are having difficulty accessing your website. You can also use Google’s Mobile-Friendly test, which allows you to test how easily a visitor can use your page on a mobile device by entering a page URL and seeing how a page scores. You will usually get a full report, possibly stating that “Page is mobile-friendly.”
Even though some websites can pass these tests, take the results with a grain of salt if you were using mobile Googlebot, which may have trouble loading all of the resources on a page. The desktop Googlebot does not experience similar issues crawling resources.
Get Google to Crawl Everything
If you block Googlebot from accessing Javascript, CSS, or any other critical parts of your website’s code, this can be a bad idea. Google needs to be able to fully crawl a page to know whether it is mobile-friendly.
When Google is not sure whether a page is mobile-friendly, it can be impossible to rank in the mobile-first index. To know whether this is an issue for you, begin by checking out your robots.txt file. The robots.txt file tells Googlebot to not crawl or index certain parts of a website. The file is typically found at site.com/robots.txt, but you can also see it inside of the Google Search Console. Also, make sure to click on “Google Index” and “Blocked Resources.” The information here lets you know if you are blocking Googlebot from crawling certain parts of your website.
Dealing with Interstitial Popups
You do not need to ask too many people to know that popup ads are widely loathed by a broad section of the public. Needless to say, Google also hates popups when they affect their mobile users.
Google wants to be sure that it is only linking its users with the best content relating to their search, so it is always unfavorable to Google to have content hidden behind a popup. Google actually rolled out an update</