A recent report by BrightEdge found that one in four mobile sites are losing traffic due to configuration errors: “Twenty-seven percent of mobile sites are ranked lower than they should be because Google and other search engines do not recognize the mobile site as related to its desktop counterpart.”

The study analyzed billions of queries and determined that “62 percent of organic searches show different results depending on whether the search was performed on a desktop or smartphone.”

BrightEdge considered mobile configuration in terms of separate URLs (dedicated mobile sites), dynamic serving and responsive design. Dedicated mobile sites evidenced a 72 percent error rate and dynamic serving errors amounted to 30 percent; no errors were found with responsive design.