Buried deep within Google’s best practices documentation (for mobile), a potentially explosive burden lies dormant. One that can negatively affect page load speed, bounce rates, and potentially rankings. Discover the problem what you can do.
It isn’t uncommon to hear that Google has made a mistake. It is, however, rare to discover that buried deep within Google’s best practices documentation (for mobile), a potentially explosive burden lies dormant. One that can negatively affect page load speed, bounce rates, and potentially rankings.
This issue is applicable to any site using a Content Delivery Network (CDN) like Akamai, and also serving special HTML or CSS for mobile depending on the user-agent of the device requesting the page. When a site serves special content on the same desktop URL, Google says it:
“…strongly recommends that your server also send the Vary (User-Agent) HTTP header on URLs that serve automatic redirects. This helps with ISP (Internet Service Provider) caching and is another signal for Googlebot and our algorithms to discover and understand your website’s configuration.”
The problem is Google didn’t take into consideration is the role of the CDN in the equation. Most websites depend on a CDN because they can serve content faster by having cached copies of a website on high-performance servers across the country (or world).
As it turns out, implementing the Vary User-Agent HTTP header effectively turns off the caching of pages. This means a CDN would be worthless and a surplus of requests would begin hitting a site owner’s server(s).
Unplanned stress on servers can lead to slower page load speeds, poor user behavior metrics, and could even affect rankings.
While Google is to blame for not taking this into consideration in its recommendation or taking action from the feedback they’ve been given, it isn’t entirely Google’s fault. There are a couple of tough factors at play here.
While these two issues make sense, it does seem that a solution could be reached if the right people were working together on both sides.
This entire problem might be another indication of mobile growing pains. Google wants another signal to indicate when it should try to find mobile content and CDNs don’t want the extra burden of caching additional copies of content.
If you’re dynamically serving different HTML on the same URL based on user-agent, ask your CDN how it handles the Vary: User-Agent HTTP Header. Most likely the CDN says it doesn’t handle it at all and this issue can be prevented. Perhaps you can pioneer the fix!
Meanwhile, if Google’s already crawling your content with Googlebot-Mobile, it’s already aware of your configuration. See if Google is crawling your mobile content by checking log files for Googlebot-Mobile. It can be found within a user-agent string like the one below:
Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_1 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/532.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0.5 Mobile/8B117 Safari/6531.22.7 (compatible; Googlebot-Mobile/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)