Bings new mobile tester disagrees with Googles?

By : Administrator
Published 13th November 2015 |
Read latest comment - 15th November 2015

So Bing have been playing catchup and have finally brought out a mobile webpage tester, so you can check it will display correctly and is user friendly for mobile device visitors.

Great news, except it seems to give different answers to Googles.

Is this just Bing and Google being awkward or do we have an issue? 

Here is the Google test page.

Awesome! 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Then below we have the Bing results, with a big bold message telling me Bing doesn't think I'm awesome

So I thought maybe it's just My Local Services, and I'd try our Trusted Trader site.

Post source Search Engine Land

So there we go, are we mobile friendly or not???

You can do your own test here:

Google Mobile test:  www.google.com/webmasters/tools/mobile-friendly/

Bing Mobile test:  www.bing.com/webmaster/tools/mobile-friendliness

Anyone else spotted any issues?


Steve Richardson
Gaffer of My Local Services
My Local Services | Me on LinkedIn
Comments

Ours was ok on both Steve


I think you need to come and fix ours Trena!


Steve Richardson
Gaffer of My Local Services
My Local Services | Me on LinkedIn

Mine is okay on both, too.


Thanks,
PamD

Hmmmm, paranoia was starting to set in! So a quick chat with our developer guru to find out why we are showing the following error for our sites:

 

For any technical minded members, or in case you are also showing the same view port error.

Apparently we used to have the mobile site set to "width device-width” but it didn’t size correctly on larger mobile screens, so it was set to a fixed width which works for everyone, and Google is quite happy with.

To confirm the bugginess of the Bing tool, it reports the site as not being mobile friendly in the tool, then in the search results, guess what...

It marks it as Mobile friendly, in the same way as Google does.

Just tested again while I was writing this post, and for some bizarre reason the Bing tool seems to have gone all Italian on me! 

B- Bing, must try harder!


Steve Richardson
Gaffer of My Local Services
My Local Services | Me on LinkedIn

Im not 100% sure if this is right but I think your site uses javascript/server side code to check for a mobile device and adds the width meta tag with the width of the device. That may be why Bings not seeing the correct meta tag.

You'd normally set the meta tag as width = device-width which is in effect 100% and zoom level 1. But then I noticed your containing elements in the body tag also have a fixed width dependent on the devices width. Generally containing div's would be width=100%, that way there's no left right scrolling.

There's probably a few more adjustments needed somewhere I did notice the DOCTYPE is not html5 but html4

I quickly tried a couple of my sites and both passed with google and bing

Thanks for the heads up on that new Bing feature though, best test a few more...


Thanks,

thanks for the new link tried it on both and I am OK


Thanks,
Andy-C | Pewter World

You'd normally set the meta tag as width = device-width which is in effect 100% and zoom level 1. But then I noticed your containing elements in the body tag also have a fixed width dependent on the devices width. Generally containing div's would be width=100%, that way there's no left right scrolling.”
 

Yup, but like I mentioned earlier, we had issues with display probs on larger mobile screens, so now we have: <meta name="viewport" content="width=325">  

Main issue is because we have a dedicated mobile site, as we have been serving mobile pages since 2009, long before it became fashionable

Downside is, what was fine coding a few years ago doesn't lend itself to moving to a more modern responsive design. Coupled with the fact we want to refresh the 2005 database design, this means a complete ground up rebuild  So current plan is to aim for this mid/late next year.

Meantime, as long a Google reports us as ok, and we show as mobile friendly in Bings actual search results, we'll take the mobile testing tool results with a pinch of salt.

But good to see them starting to play catch up Google and maybe start some investment in some better web master tool sets.


Steve Richardson
Gaffer of My Local Services
My Local Services | Me on LinkedIn

This Thread is now closed for comments