Signals How it behaves
No viewport meta
- Category
- How it behaves
- Direction
- Pushes the score up
- Weight
- +12
What it is
Weight, mobile, accessibility, SEO — where the money leaks. One signal is not a verdict. The score is the whole weighted set, not any single line of it.
How it is weighted
12 points is mid-weight: real evidence, not a smoking gun. On its own it moves the number a few points.
This one is gated. It describes an absence, and an absence is only a tell in context — on a hand-typed page from 2003 a missing meta description is period-accurate, not evidence of a generator. It only counts when the page also shows modern build or styling signals.
What to do about it
Add <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1">, then look at the page on a real phone.
Where it fires
None of our worked examples trip this one, which is itself informative — it means the pattern is rarer than the tells that fire constantly, so when it does show up it is worth paying attention to.