Google mobile-usability

Hello-

Google has recently announced that they will be penalizing sites with mobile-usability issues.
When you run their mobile-friendly report, it shows all of the Producttabs/ProductCustomTabs are problematic due to not having a viewport configured. I realize that these "pages" are never viewed as stand-alone pages, but do not want to take any chances that google will demote our SERP.

I added a viewport meta tag to each of the producttabs code, like so:
_ProductCustomTab.cshtml


@using Nop.Web.Framework
<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0, user-scalable=0, minimum-scale=1.0, maximum-scale=1.0">
<div class="custom-tab">
    @Html.Raw(Model)
</div>

This at least causes those errors to disappear, but then it reports many issues with the reviews tab pages because the recaptcha box doesn't fit inside the viewport...and many touch elements are too close, etc..

I am wondering if it would be possible to just add the tabs "pages" or directory to the robots file as nofollow?? Then maybe google will ignore them completely?

How can this be done?

Thanks,
Steve

Hi Steve,

Actually you should remove the captcha as it is not used in the tabs.
It is there but it shouldn't actually be there and it is not working.
We have commented the captcha in the code but we did this recently and I guess you are using some older version of the plugin.

OK, thanks, when I view the tab on my product detail page, no recaptcha appears, but when you view the tabs page by itself, like googlebot is doing, (http://www.myfootshop.com/ProductTab/ProductReviewsTab/374) the recaptcha appears...


...but my question is really that I want to block every possible URL of my tabs pages from googlebot. I wonder if can be done in robots.txt, like
 disallow: /ProductTab/*

Or maybe I need to just use meta tags on each of the views, like:
<meta name="googlebot" content="noindex">

My concern is that maybe this would cause googlebot to be blocked from the parent page where the tabs page is being referenced? I DO NOT want to accidentally instruct google to ignore my product pages..

Thanks,
Steve

Hi Steve,

Make sure you have the code commented like this in the _ProductReviews.cshtml file:

  @*@if (Model.AddProductReview.DisplayCaptcha)
                {
                    <div class="captcha-box">
                        @Html.Raw(Html.GenerateCaptcha())
                    </div>
                }*@

This way the recaptcha should not be displayed in the tabs regardless if open directly via the url or inside the page.



I don't think it is a good idea to block google from indexing these pages. As far as I am aware googlebot resembles the loading of the page as it is in a browser. So it is not a good idea to stop google from accessing these pages (loaded via Ajax) as they will no be indexed.
Usually google uses the sitemap to know if a page is accessible or not. In the sitemap these Ajax loaded content pages are not present, so google should ignore them as being separate pages and should not index them as regular pages.
In summary my advice is to remove the captcha and leave it as it is now.

I would have agreed with you a month ago, but now that I have learned that Google is absolutely attempting to crawl and index these tabs pages as stand-alone URL's (even though not in my sitemap), and giving bad mobile-usability reports because of them, I feel I must do something.

Thanks.

Hello again-

As of this week, we are now having traffic appear on our website that is accessing this URL:
http://www.myfootshop.com/producttab/productcustomtab/

Of course, this throws an error every time because no parameters are included:
The parameters dictionary contains a null entry for parameter 'id' of non-nullable type 'System.Int32' for method 'System.Web.Mvc.ActionResult ProductCustomTab(Int32)' in 'SevenSpikes.Nop.Plugins.NopQuickTabs.Controllers.ProductTabController'. An optional parameter must be a reference type, a nullable type, or be declared as an optional parameter. Parameter name: parameters

This is further evidence that Google is indexing the producttabs pages as stand-alone URL's, even though they are not included in the sitemap.

Am I really the only person noticing this?