How to move from m-dot URLs to responsive site

How to move from m-dot URLs to responsive site

mobile Responsive Web Design

With more sites moving towards responsive web design, many webmasters have questions about migrating from separate mobile URLs, also frequently known as "m-dot URLs", to using responsive web design. Here are some recommendations on how to move from separate urls to one responsive URL in a way that gives your sites the best chance of performing well on Google's search results.

Moving to responsive sites in a Googlebot-friendly way

Once you have your responsive site ready, moving is something you can definitely do with just a bit of forethought. Considering your URLs stay the same for desktop version, all you have to do is to configure 301 redirects from the mobile URLs to the responsive web URLs.

Here are the detailed steps:

1. Get your responsive site ready
   
2. Configure 301 redirects on the old mobile URLs to point to the responsive versions (the new pages). These redirects need to be done on a per-URL basis, individually from each mobile URLs to the responsive URLs.

3. Remove any mobile-URL specific configuration your site might have, such as conditional redirects or a vary HTTP header.
4. As a good practice, setup rel=canonical on the responsive URLs pointing to themselves (self-referential canonicals).

If you're currently using dynamic serving and want to move to responsive design, you don't need to add or change any redirects.

Some benefits for moving to responsive web design

Moving to a responsive site should make maintenance and reporting much easier for you down the road. Aside from no longer needing to manage separate URLs for all pages, it will also make it much easier to adopt practices and technologies such as hreflang for internationalization, AMP for speed, structured data for advanced search features and more.

As always, if you need more help you can ask a question in our webmaster forum.

Posted by Cherry Prommawin, Webmaster Relations

Author. Erwin Widianto

Making the Internet safer and faster: Introducing reCAPTCHA Android API

Making the Internet safer and faster: Introducing reCAPTCHA Android API

Android API apps mobile

When we launched reCAPTCHA ten years ago, we had a simple goal: enable users to visit the sites they love without worrying about spam and abuse. Over the years, reCAPTCHA has changed quite a bit. It evolved from the distorted text to street numbers and names, then No CAPTCHA reCAPTCHA in 2014 and Invisible reCAPTCHA in March this year.

By now, more than a billion users have benefited from reCAPTCHA and we continue to work to refine our protections.

reCAPTCHA protects users wherever they may be online. As the use of mobile devices has grown rapidly, it’s important to keep the mobile applications and data safe. Today, on reCAPTCHA’s tenth birthday, we’re glad to announce the first reCAPTCHA Android API as part of Google Play Services.

With this API, reCAPTCHA can better tell human and bots apart to provide a streamlined user experience on mobile. It will use our newest Invisible reCAPTCHA technology, which runs risk analysis behind the scene and has enabled millions of human users to pass through with zero click everyday. Now mobile users can enjoy their apps without being interrupted, while still staying away from spam and abuse.

reCAPTCHA Android API is included with Google SafetyNet, which provides services like device attestation and safe browsing to protect mobile apps. Mobile developers can do both the device and user attestations in the same API to mitigate security risks of their apps more efficiently. This adds to the diversity of security protections on Android: Google Play Protect to monitor for potentially harmful applications, device encryption, and regular security updates. Please visit our site to learn more about how to integrate with the reCAPTCHA Android API, and keep an eye out for our iOS library.

The journey of reCAPTCHA continues: we’ll make the Internet safer and easier to use for everyone (except bots).

Posted by Wei Liu, Product Manager, reCAPTCHA

Author. Erwin Widianto

Introducing the Mobile-Friendly Test API

Introducing the Mobile-Friendly Test API

API mobile mobile-friendly search console

With so many users on mobile devices, having a mobile-friendly web is important to us all. The Mobile-Friendly Test is a great way to check individual pages manually. We're happy to announce that this test is now available via API as well.

The Mobile-Friendly Test API lets you test URLs using automated tools. For example, you could use it to monitor important pages in your website in order to prevent accidental regressions in templates that you use. The API method runs all tests, and returns the same information - including a list of the blocked URLs - as the manual test. The documentation includes simple samples to help get you started quickly.

We hope this API makes it easier to check your pages for mobile-friendliness and to get any such issues resolved faster. We'd love to hear how you use the API -- leave us a comment here, and feel free to link to any code or implementation that you've set up! As always, if you have any questions, feel free to drop by our webmaster help forum.

Posted by John Mueller, Webmaster Trends Analyst, Google Switzerland

Author. Erwin Widianto

An update on Google's feature-phone crawling & indexing

An update on Google's feature-phone crawling & indexing

advanced crawling and indexing mobile

Limited mobile devices, "feature-phones", require a special form of markup or a transcoder for web content. Most websites don't provide feature-phone-compatible content in WAP/WML any more. Given these developments, we've made changes in how we crawl feature-phone content (note: these changes don't affect smartphone content):

1. We've retired the feature-phone Googlebot

We won't be using the feature-phone user-agents for crawling for search going forward.

2. Use "handheld" link annotations for dynamic serving of feature-phone content.

Some sites provide content for feature-phones through dynamic serving, based on the user's user-agent. To understand this configuration, make sure your desktop and smartphone pages have a self-referential alternate URL link for handheld (feature-phone) devices:

<link rel="alternate" media="handheld" href="[current page URL]" />

This is a change from our previous guidance of only using the "vary: user-agent" HTTP header. We've updated our documentation on making feature-phone pages accordingly. We hope adding this link element is possible on your side, and thank you for your help in this regard. We'll continue to show feature-phone URLs in search when we can recognize them, and when they're appropriate for users.

3. We're retiring feature-phone tools in Search Console

Without the feature-phone Googlebot, special sitemaps extensions for feature-phone, the Fetch as Google feature-phone options, and feature-phone crawl errors are no longer needed. We continue to support sitemaps and other sitemaps extensions (such as for videos or Google News), as well as the other Fetch as Google options in Search Console.

We've worked to make these changes as minimal as possible. Most websites don't serve feature-phone content, and wouldn't be affected. If your site has been providing feature-phone content, we thank you for your help in bringing the Internet to feature-phone users worldwide!

For any questions, feel free to drop by our Webmaster Help Forums!

Posted by John Mueller, Webmaster Trends Analyst, Google Switzerland

Author. Erwin Widianto

Rich Cards expands to more verticals

Rich Cards expands to more verticals

AMP mobile rich cards search results structured data

At Google I/O in May, we launched Rich Cards for Movies and Recipes, creating a new way for site owners to present previews of their content on the Search results page. Today, we’re expanding to two new verticals for US-based sites: Local restaurants and Online courses.

Evolution of search results for queries like [best New Orleans restaurants] and [leadership courses]: with rich cards, results are presented in new UIs, like carousels that are easy to browse by scrolling left and right, or a vertical three-pack that displays more individual courses

By building Rich Cards, you have a new opportunity to attract more engaged users to your page. Users can swipe through restaurant recommendations from sites like TripAdvisor, Thrillist, Time Out, Eater, and 10Best. In addition to food, users can browse through courses from sites like Coursera, LinkedIn Learning, EdX, Harvard, Udacity, FutureLearn, Edureka, Open University, Udemy, Canvas Network, and NPTEL.

If you have a site that contains local restaurant information or offers online courses, check out our developer docs to start building Rich Cards in the Local restaurant and Online courses verticals.

While AMP HTML is not required for Local restaurant pages and Online Courses rich cards, AMP provides Google Search users with a consistently fast experience, so we recommend that you create AMP pages to further engage users. Users consuming AMP’d content will be able to swipe near instantly from restaurant to restaurant or from recipe to recipe within your site.

Users who tap on your Rich Card will be taken near instantly to your AMP page, and be able to swipe between pages within your site.

Check out our developer site for implementation details.

To make it easier for you to create Rich Cards, we made some changes in our tools:

• The Structured Data Testing Tool displays markup errors and a preview card for Local restaurant content as it might appear on Search.
• The Rich Cards report in Search Console shows which cards across verticals contain errors, and which ones could be enhanced with more markup.
• The AMP Test helps validate AMP pages as well as mark up on the page.

What’s next?

We are actively experimenting with new verticals globally to provide more opportunities for you to display richer previews of your content.

If you have questions, find us in the dedicated Structured data section of our forum, on Twitter or on Google+.

Post by Stacie Chan, Global Product Partnerships

Author. Erwin Widianto