Google Is Reading the Phone Version

What changed, in one sentence

Google used to look at the desktop version of a page to decide what it was about. Now it looks at the phone version.

That sounds like a technical detail and it has a direct consequence: if your mobile site shows less than your desktop site, the less is what counts.

The change has been rolling out gradually for a while rather than arriving on a date, which is part of why so few small businesses have acted on it.

Why this catches people

Because of how sites get built and checked.

A site is designed on a large screen. It is reviewed on a large screen. The owner looks at it on a large screen, sees everything, and concludes it is fine.

The phone version is treated as a compressed afterthought, and a common way of compressing is to hide things that do not fit.

Which was a reasonable design decision when the desktop version was what mattered, and is now actively harmful.

The specific ways content goes missing

• Hidden on small screens, where a block is simply not displayed below a certain width.
• Collapsed into accordions, which is usually fine, but not if the content is removed rather than folded.
• Shortened deliberately, where the mobile version carries a trimmed description.
• A separate mobile site with fewer pages than the main one.
• Images without descriptions on mobile that exist on desktop.
• Structured information included on one version and not the other.

The fourth is the most severe and the least common now. The first is by far the most frequent, and it is usually a single line in a stylesheet that somebody added years ago to stop a block breaking a narrow layout.

How to check your own

1. Open your site on an actual phone, not a resized desktop window.
2. Read a service page end to end and compare it against the desktop version.
3. Count the headings on both. A missing heading usually means a missing section.
4. Check the menu reaches every page it reaches on desktop.
5. Look for text that has become an image, which some mobile layouts do.
6. Check the contact details appear, since these are sometimes dropped for space.

The second is the one that finds real problems. Reading a page properly on a phone is different from glancing at it, and businesses are often surprised by how much shorter the mobile version is.

A worked example

An accountancy practice with a detailed services page: six services, each with several paragraphs explaining what was included and who it suited.

On a phone, the theme collapsed each service to its heading and first sentence, with the rest hidden entirely rather than expandable. The design decision was reasonable in intent: the page would have been enormous otherwise.

The effect was that roughly eighty percent of the words on their most important page were invisible to a phone, and therefore to Google.

They had been wondering for a year why a competitor with a thinner site outranked them for several services.

The fix was making the collapsed sections expandable rather than absent, so the content was present in the page and simply folded. Two hours of work. The rankings recovered over the following months.

What this does not mean

Some proportion, because the change gets over-interpreted.

It does not mean the desktop version stops mattering to visitors. Plenty of business research still happens on a laptop, and a desktop site that looks poor still costs you.

It does not mean you need a separate mobile site. The opposite: one site that adapts is the arrangement that avoids this problem entirely.

And it does not mean cramming everything onto a phone screen. Content can be folded, tabbed or progressively revealed. It just has to be in the page.

What to do about it

The fix is nearly always the same, and it is smaller than the problem sounds.

Find the rule that hides the content and change it to fold rather than remove. In practice that means the section is still in the page, collapsed behind a heading somebody can tap.

Search engines read folded content. Visitors get a page they can scan rather than one they have to scroll through. Both improve at once, which is unusual.

Where the mobile version was shortened deliberately, the answer is to stop maintaining two versions of the words. One set of content, presented differently at different widths, is less work and removes the problem permanently.

Neither is a redesign. Both are adjustments to how an existing page behaves at narrow widths.

The related thing worth fixing

While you are looking at the phone version, look at how long it takes to load on mobile data rather than office wifi.

The two problems travel together. A site that hides content on mobile was usually built without much thought about mobile generally, and is frequently slow as well.

A visitor on a patchy connection waiting eight seconds leaves regardless of what the page would have said.

That is not the subject of this change, and it affects the same visitors in the same session, so it is worth checking in the same afternoon.

If your site is genuinely old

A site that does not resize at all is a different situation.

There, the mobile version is the desktop version shrunk, which means the content is technically all present. It ranks, and it is unusable: text too small to read, buttons too small to press, and horizontal scrolling.

So the indexing change is not your most urgent problem. The visitors who arrive and immediately leave are.

Both point at the same fix, which is a site that adapts to the screen. That is now the default in any current build, which is why this mostly affects sites of a certain age.

If a rebuild is not this year's budget, there is an interim worth knowing about. Making the text larger and the tap targets bigger on an old fixed-width site is a modest change that does not fix the layout and does make the site usable on a phone. It buys time without pretending to be a solution.

If yours is one of those, the same age bracket has other issues worth checking, as covered in Flash is finished this year.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.