During the middle of November, a major shift occurred in the mobile search world – with Google announcing and launching their ‘mobile-friendly’ tag in the mobile search results.
Bing also got involved recently by revealing some mobile ranking factors and techniques.
Google, who owns 67% of the market share (as of October 2014, down from 67.3% the previous month), has implemented a ‘mobile-friendly’ label in their mobile search results. These labels, which also carry a ranking boost, show mobile users what sites will display properly on their smart phones and tablets. This is another step that Google and other major search engines are taking in effort to ultimately please their users with relevant and useful results.
Bing recently revealed some of their mobile ranking factors and techniques that they take into account when ranking mobile content. According to Search Engine Land (http://searchengineland.com/bing-mobile-ranking-techniques-relevancy-factors-209418) these factors include:
– Identify and classify mobile and device-friendly web pages and websites
– Analyze web documents from a mobile point-of-view by looking at:
– Content compatibility
– Content readability
– Mobile functionality
– Return more mobile-friendly URLs to the mobile results pages
– Ranking the results pages based on all of the above
If your site is not mobile friendly right now, it may be time to consider a redesign of your website. More and more people are searching on their mobile devices, so not having Google’s ‘mobile-friendly’ label will be an immediate mark against you in the eyes of the searchers.
When redesigning your website, consider a responsive website design. This way you don’t have to create a normal, desktop version of your site, and a mobile version of your site.