If you’re doing SEO for mobile sites, you may have noticed recently that Youtube mobile pages are all over the place in Google Mobile search engine results (mobile web). For any kind of query typed, you’ll see one or more Youtube links in the first result page. And very often, these Youtube videos are not relevant at all.
Check out the search results for the query “soulja boy” for example. (or view a screenshot here)
See that? Does Google think that people only want to see videos from their mobile?
I think that it’s a good thing that Google decided to include links to videos in its mobile search results, but having that many links to videos is not relevant at all. If people are looking for mobile web pages, they’ll have to do several clicks to find them, which is not helping the mobile user experience at all.
I hope that Google is aware of this situation and is trying to improve the quality of its mobile search results.
following on from Nadir, I too have noticed that youtube mobile has been dominating search results for a while now.
hmmm. well the mobile carriers probably enjoy the data revenue ? If your’e not on a flat rate data plan then its expensive to stream videos.
However, there seems to have been a major change in google.com/xhtml results very recently ?
At least when you see it on a PC it looks much better.Most of the youtube links have gone, more .mobi sites in and generally better
all round from a ‘mobile’ point of view.
However, my carrier Movistar in Spain is still showing the old results with yep, youtube all over it on most keywords.
Hopefully it will update also and display the new results soon.
I will keep you posted !
Hi David, thanks for your comment. Indeed, it looks like Google ‘cleaned’ up its mobile search results.
I’ve talked about an update on this post:
http://www.seoprinciple.com/mobile-seo-google-updates-its-mobile-web-index/23/
Results are more relevant now.
Also, yes, when you use Google Search from a carrier’s portals, you sometimes get different results than when typing directly google.com on your mobile browser, probably because all datacenters have not been updated yet.