Most people just tend to check their homepage when it comes to ensuring their sites are mobile friendly. And again, it is their homepage that people check in Google Search to make sure they have the mobile-friendly tag. But you should be checking more than just the homepage too.
I have heard of several cases in the past couple of weeks where webmasters thought their sites were mobile-friendly because they switched to a new responsive design (or one of the other types of mobile-friendly designs) and thought all was good. They did the mobile checker as well as the SERP test and the homepage passed with flying colors.
Because it can take a while for Google to recrawl an entire site, many assumed that once they made the change, Google would eventually recrawl each page and the number of mobile usability errors would drop down over time, both showing up in the search results and with the errors being displayed in Google Webmaster Tools.
But with the mobile friendly ranking signal applied on a page-by-page basis, webmasters either don’t think to test various styles of internal pages for confirmation or they simply assume once the homepage passes, the site will get its mobile friendly tag.
If you are one of the many last minute mobile friendly convertors, remember to check a variety of your internal pages to ensure they are also mobile-friendly so you do not get caught like some webmasters are.
We also have our Google’s mobile friendly algo guide, as well as 3 ways you can force Google to reindex those pages for the mobile-friendly tag.
Jennifer Slegg
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Matthew Shepherd says
Great advice Jennifer. I thought it might be worth mentioning that URLProfiler recently added a feature to allow mass checking of mobile friendliness for a list of URLs.
I have found it very handy to get a better picture of a site’s overall mobile friendliness.