Promoting modern websites for modern devices in Google search results
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Tuesday, July 15, 2014
A common annoyance for web users is when websites require browser technologies that are not
supported by their device. When users access such pages, they may see nothing but a blank space or
miss out a large portion of the page's contents.
Starting today in our English search results in the US, we will indicate to searchers when our
algorithms detect pages that may not work on their devices. For example, Adobe Flash is not
supported on iOS devices or on Android versions 4.1 and higher, and a page whose contents are
mostly Flash may be noted like this:
Developing modern multi-device websites
Fortunately, making websites that work on all modern devices is not that hard: websites can use
HTML5 since it is universally supported, sometimes exclusively, by all devices. To help webmasters
build websites that work on all types of devices regardless of the type of content they wish to
serve, we recently
announced
two resources:
Web Starter Kit:
a starter framework supporting the Web Fundamentals best practices out of the box.
By following the best practices described in Web Fundamentals you can build a
responsive web design, which has long been
Google's recommendation
for search-friendly sites. Be sure not to block crawling of any Googlebot of the page assets
(CSS, JavaScript, and images) using robots.txt or otherwise. Being able to access these external
files fully helps our algorithms detect your site's responsive web design configuration and treat
it appropriately. You can use the
Fetch and render as Google
feature in Webmaster Tools to test how our indexing algorithms see your site.
As always, if you need more help you can ask a question in
our webmaster forum.
Posted by Keita Oda, Software Engineer, and
Pierre Far,
Webmaster Trends Analyst
[[["Easy to understand","easyToUnderstand","thumb-up"],["Solved my problem","solvedMyProblem","thumb-up"],["Other","otherUp","thumb-up"]],[["Missing the information I need","missingTheInformationINeed","thumb-down"],["Too complicated / too many steps","tooComplicatedTooManySteps","thumb-down"],["Out of date","outOfDate","thumb-down"],["Samples / code issue","samplesCodeIssue","thumb-down"],["Other","otherDown","thumb-down"]],[],[[["Google Search will now indicate to US English users when websites may not be compatible with their device due to technology requirements."],["Websites are encouraged to adopt HTML5 for universal device compatibility."],["Google provides Web Fundamentals and Web Starter Kit as resources for building modern, multi-device websites."],["Responsive web design is recommended, ensuring Googlebot access to all page assets for proper indexing."]]],["The content announces a new feature in US English search results that indicates when web pages might not work on a user's device, citing Adobe Flash's incompatibility with certain devices as an example. To address this, the article promotes building modern, multi-device websites using HTML5 and resources like \"Web Fundamentals\" and \"Web Starter Kit\". Webmasters are urged to use responsive web design, allow full crawling of page assets by Googlebot, and test their site's indexing with \"Fetch and render as Google.\"\n"]]
