Smart brands rec­og­nize the impor­tance of being mobile-friend­ly. They know con­sumers are increas­ing­ly using mobile through­out the pur­chase jour­ney and will aban­don bad mobile sites. Google also rec­og­nizes the impor­tance of mobile, recent­ly adding a “Mobile-friend­ly” label to its search results, with a sig­nif­i­cant mobile search rank­ing update on the hori­zon tomor­row (April 21), which will pass or fail pages on a page-by-page basis. Which got us to think­ing – just how mobile-friend­ly are the biggest glob­al brands?

We looked at Google’s mobile search results for the top 100 glob­al brands, as ranked by Inter­brand, to see which sites’ home pages have received a “Mobile-friend­ly” label from Google.

Eighty-five per­cent of brands passed the test. This includes names you’d expect to be mobile-friend­ly – includ­ing Apple, Coca-Cola, Microsoft, Face­book, and Google itself.

But for the 15 brands that didn’t earn a “Mobile-friend­ly” label, we used Google’s Mobile-Friend­ly Test tool to see why Google failed to give them the des­ig­na­tion.

What’s inter­est­ing is that a few of the brands that failed to earn the “Mobile-friend­ly” label actu­al­ly were mobile-friend­ly, accord­ing to Google’s own tool! So what gives? Let’s look at all the results.

Mobile-Friendly Sites That Didn’t Earn Google’s ‘Mobile-Friendly’ Label

When it comes to reward­ing mobile-friend­ly sites, we found Google isn’t entire­ly accu­rate.

Four mobile-friend­ly sites failed to earn Google’s “Mobile-friend­ly” des­ig­na­tion. Yet, after test­ing the home pages of Kellogg’s, Pana­son­ic, John­nie Walk­er, and Piz­za Hut with Google’s Mobile Friend­ly Test tool, Google report­ed those sites actu­al­ly were mobile-friend­ly.

What’s the deal? Why haven’t these brands that obvi­ous­ly have invest­ed in mobile received the mobile-friend­ly label?

Turns out, there are a cou­ple of rea­sons why Google says it doesn’t give pages the “mobile-friend­ly” des­ig­na­tion:

• Google’s crawlers haven’t yet rein­dexed the mobile-friend­ly ver­sion of the page. Google’s test­ing tool checks pages in real-time, so it might be the case that the tool is ahead of Google’s crawlers.
• The web­site is block­ing resources Google needs to ren­der the page.

If you have recent­ly con­vert­ed a page to be more friend­ly, yet Google isn’t rec­og­niz­ing it, what can you do?

Accord­ing to Jen­nifer Slegg, writ­ing at The SEM­Post, you can do the fol­low­ing:

• Use the fetch and sub­mit func­tion in Google Web­mas­ter Tools.
• If you have a cat­e­go­ry page that leads to all of the low­er-lev­el pages in that sec­tion, then “you can sub­mit that page and say this page and all the linked pages should be recrawled as soon as pos­si­ble.”
• Last­ly, you can also set up a sitemap file and sub­mit it to Google with all the changes made recent­ly, essen­tial­ly telling Google “I updat­ed my whole web­site, it has a new change date on it and Google will try to use that as well to speed up crawl­ing of those pages.

Disallowed by Robots.txt

Two brands, IBM and Gap, failed to earn the “Mobile-friend­ly” label on their home pages because their URLs redi­rect to mobile sites (http://m.ibm.com/us/ and http://m.gap.com/browse/home.do, respec­tive­ly) that were dis­al­lowed by their robots.txt files, accord­ing to Google’s tool.

Because these brands used their robots.txt file to restrict­ed Google’s abil­i­ty to access their sites, any­one who search­es for either brand will see this mes­sage in the search results: “A descrip­tion for this result is not avail­able because of this site’s robots.txt.”

To find out if your site is hav­ing this same issue, do a mobile search for your brand on Google. If you see this mes­sage, the fix is sim­ple: update your robots.txt file.

Not Mobile-Friendly

Nine of the 100 home­pages of brands we looked at failed the mobile-friend­ly test. The rea­sons for that fail­ure dif­fered slight­ly from brand to brand – some mobile sites failed due to poor usabil­i­ty, while oth­ers failed due to block­ing resources Google needs to ren­der the page accu­rate­ly. And shock­ing­ly, some of these giant brands have no mobile web­site at all!

So which brands are mobile-fail­ures?

Nike

Why it failed:

• Text too small to read.
• Links too close togeth­er.
• Mobile view­port not set.

Sports brand Nike has a sep­a­rate mobile site (m.nike.com), but sim­ply hav­ing a mobile site isn’t enough to be “mobile-friend­ly” by Google’s def­i­n­i­tion. “Just do it” … wrong.

Canon

Why it failed:

• Text too small to read.
• Links too close togeth­er.
• Mobile view­port not set.

Canon, a man­u­fac­tur­er of cam­eras and acces­sories, has opt­ed with going “unre­spon­sive”, forc­ing a web­site designed for desk­tops on mobile con­sumers. “Delight­ing you always” … as long as you aren’t a mobile user.

Nescafe

Why it failed:

• Text too small to read.
• Links too close togeth­er.
• Mobile view­port not set.
• Uses incom­pat­i­ble plu­g­ins.

Like Canon, Nescafe is serv­ing its mobile-unfriend­ly desk­top home page. That plu­g­in issue? Flash. Wel­come to the non-mobile world of Nescafe.

Siemens

Why it failed:

• Con­tent wider than screen.
• Links too close togeth­er.

This is a bit of an odd one. Siemens has a sep­a­rate mobile site (m.siemens.com/) that doesn’t get a “Mobile-friend­ly” label when doing a Google search on Android, but the same home page gets a “Mobile-friend­ly” label when search­ing on an iPhone.

Despite pass­ing or fail­ing in the search results depend­ing on the device, it still fails Google’s test for the above two rea­sons. I’m not see­ing the “con­tent wider than screen” issue on either of the smart­phones used for this test­ing. Good luck, Siemens!

AXA

Why it failed:

• Text too small to read.
• Links too close togeth­er.
• Mobile view­port not set.
• Con­tent wider than screen.

Although finan­cial brand AXA has opt­ed for respon­sive design, Google is accu­rate in its assess­ment. This site needs some good advice about its design.

Nestle

Why it failed:

• Text too small to read.
• Mobile view­port not set.
• Links too close togeth­er.
• Con­tent wider than screen.

Food and bev­er­age brand Nes­tle fails here. But it looks like what Google’s tool is see­ing is dif­fer­ent from what I’m see­ing. Blame Nes­tle for some bad mobile SEO.

The cul­prit seems to be 17 resources that couldn’t be loaded. The fact that Google can’t access the resources it needs to ren­der the page means Nes­tle gets a fail­ing grade. Nes­tle should eas­i­ly receive a “Mobile-friend­ly” label once the brand allows Google access to those resources.

DHL

Why it failed:

• Text too small to read.
• Links too close togeth­er.
• Mobile view­port not set.
• Con­tent wider than screen.

Glob­al logis­tics brand DHL sim­ply fails to deliv­er an excel­lent mobile expe­ri­ence, instead giv­ing mobile users a web­site designed for the desk­top.

MasterCard

Why it failed:

• Links too close togeth­er.
• Text too small to read.
• Mobile view­port not set.
• Con­tent wider than screen.

There are some things mon­ey can’t buy – and one of them is appar­ent­ly a mobile web­site for cred­it card giant Mas­ter­Card. Here is yet anoth­er brand giv­ing a web­site designed for desk­tops to mobile users.

Kleenex

Why it failed:

• Text too small to read.
• Links too close togeth­er.
• Mobile view­port not set.

The lack of a mobile site by Kleenex fig­u­ra­tive­ly makes me want to cry.

Conclusion

Users want mobile-friend­ly sites. So do the search engines.

Whether you go with respon­sive design, dynam­ic-serv­ing, or a ded­i­cat­ed mobile site (m.dot), the key is to ensure what­ev­er con­fig­u­ra­tion you choose, do it right. Oth­er­wise, searchers may just start pass­ing your site up in favor of a “mobile-friend­ly” com­peti­tor.

Down­load our Mobile SEO Now ebook to learn every­thing you need to know about con­sumer smart­phone usage, why it’s crit­i­cal to be mobile-friend­ly, and what you need to do to suc­cess­ful­ly opti­mize your web pres­ence for mobile con­sumers.

Does your brand or busi­ness have a “Mobile-friend­ly” label?