Viewing Google reports 'viewport not set to device-width'

Google reports 'viewport not set to device-width'



User: Richard D. 2 years ago
In July I successfully updated my website creating mobile versions for each web page. Recently I have been getting reports from google crawler saying that viewport is not set to “device-width” on some full screen pages and therefore affecting mobile usability. Nothing has changed and it seems that Google crawler is not identifying that the page is for full screen devices with a separate page for mobiles.

Has something changed in the way Google identifies pages or does something need to be tweaked in the design?
User: EverWeb Support 2 years ago
Hi Richard,

Can you send this report to us to see what exactly it says?
And you can open a ticket with us here https://billing.ragesw.com/submitticket.php and send us your project file, so we could check the width.
Looking forward to your reply.

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EverWeb Customer Support
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User: Richard D. 2 years ago
The message says “ The following issues were found on your site: Viewport not set to "device-width" . In my google console it then refers to two affected pages. I checked the viewport setting and it is set to 800px as per the master page for all the full screen pages. My understanding is that the value “device-width” is for responsive pages only.

I think it is a crawl error. Nothing has changed in 6 months and it only reports this on two pages now. I know Google changed crawl last year to penalise non-mobile pages. Maybe they have changed again. I don’t how they handle instances where there are alternative mobile pages.

If it continues to be a problem I could alter the robots file for googlebot to exclude full screen pages. Google only care about mobile so at least those should still be indexed and not affect my ranking.

P.S. Please review the login timeout on this page. It's a pain to have to retype a message after you press post only discover you have been logged out. Thanks
User: Richard D. 2 years ago
After another Google mobile issue report on a page I found a Google document about linking desktop and mobile sites for crawling by setting a link in the desktop URL to the relevant mobile URL which Everweb does but it doesn't put a link in the mobile one referring back to the desktop one which Google recommends.

I've just done this in the Head code area for each mobile page so will see what happens.

"2. On the mobile page, add a rel="canonical" tag pointing to the corresponding desktop URL"


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