Mobile version of NopCommerce not recognized by Google?

Same issue here, if you enable the mobile theme from administration you will get flagged by Google and your ranking will take a hit.  It has made that feature useless.  It may have something to do with the googlebot user agent. Until someone can come up with an answer all nopCommerce users should migrate to a responsive theme I guess, I'm not looking forward to the time and cost of that.

Also, if you have a responsive theme installed you will pass the test even if a mobile theme is installed since Google sees it as the desktop version.  If you don't have a responsive theme, you will fail the test no matter what.  We have 2 stores with different themes on the same site.  One passes the test, the other does not.

Any further information about this issue?  It seems that it's still happening to many people...

The issue appears to be 51Degrees, according to the following page, these are the googlebot-mobile user agents:

Googlebot User-Agents

However, this user agent is detected as being mobile by 51Degrees (on our website):

SAMSUNG-SGH-E250/1.0 Profile/MIDP-2.0 Configuration/CLDC-1.1 UP.Browser/6.2.3.3.c.1.101 (GUI) MMP/2.0 (compatible; Googlebot-Mobile/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)

And these two are not:

Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 6_0 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/536.26 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/6.0 Mobile/10A5376e Safari/8536.25 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)

DoCoMo/2.0 N905i(c100;TB;W24H16) (compatible; Googlebot-Mobile/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)

I verified in my IIS logs that those UA strings are what Googlebot-mobile is using.

If you use the 51degrees user agent tester tool (https://51degrees.com/resources/user-agent-tester), it detects them as mobile. However, maybe that's a part of the premium data only?

Excellent find!  Thanks a lot.

It should then be a simple case of just manually updating the underlying 51 degrees data file.

Yes, you would think. But, I'm using the latest version (3.1.12.6) and the latest dat file (51Degrees-LiteV3_1.dat) and no joy. Upgrading 51Degrees solved most of my mobile issues (with the UA browser switchers)...except the Google Mobile-Friendly test. The things we do to pass those google tests...

Anyway, according to this:

51Degrees - Detection - V3

There appears to be a way to add files (xml and others) as a patch to the detection portion of the 51Degrees.config file. So, I'm trying to figure out the format now, but running out of time today. I might have to resume tomorrow...

Sounds good.  Please keep us updated with your findings.

If all else fails, maybe it'd be worth attempting to do the mobile device detection using a different library (e.g WURFL).

Well... after messing with this for several hours now. The newest version of 51Degress doesn't appear to support xml patches as the website suggests (or at least not for the Lite data). It crashed our site with an exception when trying to implement the <xmlFiles> section in the config file. It's really hard to know what 51Degrees is doing even after setting the log level to Debug as the debug info is hardly thorough in what it's actually doing. In other words, the log is not telling about the client's requests and how those are routed.

However, if we look at this older 51Degress XML file here:

https://github.com/51Degreesmobi/51Degrees.mobi-Lite-XML

And search it for those googlebot-mobile user agents...if I'm reading the xml file correct, they are already marked as mobile crawlers. So, I would assume it's the same in the newer dat file and I really don't know why nopCommerce/51Degrees is not showing the mobile site for those two UAs.

I was reading about WURFL, but imagine (in regards to what I read) it's all the same stuff. I don't know all the intricacies of how 51Degrees is tied into nopCommerce, so WURFL would come with a slightly larger learning curve, but I suppose it's not outside the realm of possibilities (assuming it works).

The newest nopCommerce solves this issue with a responsive layout. So, I'd rather just upgrade in that direction, but considering we're back on 2.65 (after upgrading from a W2K3 Server a few months ago which was limited to .NET4), that route sounds pretty scary too...

Some more food for thought...

I just remembered that BrowserCaps was enabled too. Once, I commented that out of the web.config file... now the Samsung UA is no longer being recognized as mobile either. So, that means all three googlebot-mobile UAs are not triggering the mobile site. However, the rest I was having issues with are still working as mobile...  which these symptoms to me seem better from a consistency standpoint.

I'd be interested to know if anyone else is experiencing the same behavior after upgrading 51Degrees?

Another thought is that I could downgrade 51Degrees to a year ago or so, so that I can use and tweak the xml files, but not sure how fruitful this would be and would require a recompile and all that. Plus, that new dat file format is supposed to be ~100X faster.

Another thought would be to put BrowserCaps back and add the edits to it, but that's taking a serious step backwards. BrowserCaps is deprecated by probably more than 10 years... the latest browserCaps.config file I could find is from around 2006...

There is also browscap.org which keeps a updated list, but I'm not real sure how to implement their data at this point.

Decisions, decisions.

...and, 51Degrees website responds to all three googlebot-mobile UAs as mobile. Then again, they might not even be using their own service, who knows.

But, this is really starting to look like a ploy to push people into the premium data...

Edit: Actually, my first googlebot-mobile request triggered their mobile site and then it cached that I'm a mobile client. Even after I switched back, it wouldn't recognize me as a desktop client until I clicked the Desktop link at the bottom (and then it no longer will recognize me as a mobile client...so hard to test their site conclusively...