Yandex Webmaster has begun to report on and check signals about the presence of a connection between the desktop and mobile versions of the site’s pages. The service will notify you of errors, and webmasters will be able to fix them.
As the Webmaster’s blog states, mobile-friendliness is now one of the key optimization parameters, since almost half of the traffic to websites comes from smartphones.
Usually, upon receiving a request, Yandex determines the user’s device type and offers him either a mobile or desktop page. The search should link the desktop and mobile versions if the mobile version is located on a different address or subdomain. To do this, the Yandex robot has to download the desktop version twice:
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- with a desktop User-Agent to extract the indication of the mobile version from the link=alternate tag;
- with a mobile User-Agent to extract the redirect to the mobile version.
If the mobile version in the link=alternate tag and the redirect target for mobile users are missing or don’t match, the search won’t be able to reliably link between pages, and you’ll get a notification in Webmaster about this.
In the near future, the Webmaster will see the adaptability of the entire site for mobile devices and not just the mobile suitability of individual pages.
Recall that earlier Yandex introduced a major update to the Mobile Mediation interface.
