Google has warned website owners to be more careful when serving mobile searchers. In fact, Google is so serious about its mobile customers that it is showing them which websites are showing less than optimal mobile websites.

On the Webmaster Central blog, Google told webmasters that it will be setting up special messages to alert mobile searchers if a website of interest has a “faulty redirect” in place that sends them to the websites homepage.

A lot of websites have less than optimal mobile builds, and such redirects are used as a stop gap measure to avoid a not found or 404 page. Many website owners do not know if their websites are properly optimised for mobile.

According to Google:

We’d like to spare users the frustration of landing on irrelevant pages and help webmasters fix the faulty redirects. Starting today in our English search results in the US, whenever we detect that smartphone users are redirected to a homepage instead of the the page they asked for, we may note it below the result. If you still wish to proceed to the page, you can click “Try anyway.”

As is apparent, the warning is quite conspicuous within the mobile search results, and may likely discourage users from clicking.

But there is light at the end of the tunnel for webmasters. Google will warn website owners of such faulty redirects within the Crawl Errors section of Google Webmaster Tools.

If you are unsure if your website is optimised for mobile, get in touch with Net66!