I am very critical of Google's algorithm and people's SEO, because of the huge influence that has had on the WWW.
This is social engineering that I like. I hate people serving up weird broken content because they've detected a browser window size.
But it's not even that. Google have discovered some sites return a useful hit, but when the mobile user clicks that link they are re-directed to a non-useful page. That makes Google results less useful for those users. Google is thus only asking you to make those hits as useful as they appear to be. That's perfectly acceptable. It's not different to down-grading people who stuff a bunch of keywords at the end of the page - those are not useful to anyone and thus Google doesn't give them high rating.
If any Googler's (or DDGers or etc) are reading I'd love it if search engines gave me an option to search for "Valid HTML and valid CSS only".
This is social engineering that I like. I hate people serving up weird broken content because they've detected a browser window size.
But it's not even that. Google have discovered some sites return a useful hit, but when the mobile user clicks that link they are re-directed to a non-useful page. That makes Google results less useful for those users. Google is thus only asking you to make those hits as useful as they appear to be. That's perfectly acceptable. It's not different to down-grading people who stuff a bunch of keywords at the end of the page - those are not useful to anyone and thus Google doesn't give them high rating.
If any Googler's (or DDGers or etc) are reading I'd love it if search engines gave me an option to search for "Valid HTML and valid CSS only".