Google Reader mobile hi-jacks your pages
There is a subtle but possibly important between the regular Google Reader and the mobile version. If you follow an outgoing link from the regular version, by clicking on the post title, you are immediately taken to the original page. On the mobile version there’s no hyperlink on the title. Instead, you can follow the link at the bottom of the article that says ’see original’. The ‘original’ page is served from the Google cache, and rendered in an ‘adapted’ version. This basically means all CSS is stripped away, and long pages are paginated.
Next to that, a new header and footer are inserted, containing additional features, added by Google. The footer also contains a Google search. A link ‘view in HTML’ at the very bottom will take you to the actual original page. I wonder what this means e.g. in terms of page views? As more and more traffic comes from readers, and as more and more traffic comes from mobile (my cell-phone has become my main RSS reading device), a lot of potential hits will be stopped at Google’s servers. The actual hit in your stats will be coming from a Googlebot. Since Google is making part of it’s living from the advertising on many of these blogs, they may want to rethink that strategy. (Or maybe this is exactly what they like, I’m no expert on Google’s business model.)
I understand that many sites are unfit for mobile display. But many sites are fit, and behave quite decent om my mobile browser. Their owners have in many cases spent countless hours adapting their own look-and-feel to the mobile experience, and the sites deserve that respect. In any case, this is not for Google to judge, they’re just the middleman in this.
