Some of Silicon Valley’s important public services have not caught up to the smartphone era and will be harder to find online tomorrow when Google begins altering its search results to favor mobile-friendly websites.
Among the agencies and companies that are unlikely to survive Tuesday’s Mobilegeddon are the San Mateo County Transit bus and commuter train agency, Alameda County (home to Tesla and Pandora), the East Bay Municipal Utility District and the Bay Area branch of Texas-based trash haulers Waste Management. We checked all of them through Google’s mobile-friendly test. SamTrans, for instance, failed on four different metrics: the homepage’s text is too small to read on mobile devices, the links are too close together, the mobile view-port is not set and the content is wider than the screen.
“As more people use mobile devices to access the Internet, our algorithms have to adapt to these usage patterns,” Google said in a February blog statement that warned about the changes coming on April 21.
That means that, as the AP reported a few days ago, “websites that don’t fit the description will be demoted in Google’s search results on smartphones while those meeting the criteria will be more likely to appear at the top of the rankings.”
All of the Bay Area’s biggest cities — San Jose, San Francisco and Oakland — passed the test with flying colors, as did the website of Santa Clara County. So did some private utility companies, such as PG&E.
Above: The website for the East Bay Municipal Utility District is not mobile-friendly, according to Google Developers.
