Big brands are still using m-dot and that’s a big mistake

Last Thursday, Google came out with another announcement about the importance of moving from an m-dot site to a mobile responsive one. M-dot is the old way we used to create mobile sites by using it as a sub-domain. That’s how we used to view websites on phones when it was first possible to do so. It was different coding, so you had to adjust for a bunch of different devices. Now with responsive sites, they just basically resize and adjust to every type of device that views them.

The problem with m-dot was maintaining them as a different site. On top of that, a lot of businesses used a cut-down version of their desktop site for mobile. Someone would search for a business using mobile, and they’d be redirected to the cut-down site. Google sees that as a problem, considering it a faulty redirect. If you’re already running an m-dot site, you’ve probably got some of those Google errors in your website already which is going to cause you to lose a lot of traffic.

By having one site with a responsive design, you won’t have indexing issues and you’ll only have to maintain one site. When we move to mobile first next year, this is going to be a real issue for site owners who aren’t prepared. So if you’ve got an m-dot site, it’s time to start moving it to a responsive site, and finish before the end of the year. We don’t know exactly when mobile first is coming, but it looks like the beginning of next year.