‘Mobilegeddon’ Starts Today As Google Rejigs Mobile Search Rankings To Favor Phone-Optimized Sites
Google officially rolled out its search update for mobile devices today with the aim of providing more mobile-friendly webpages in its search results. The update affects only searches made on mobile devices; your PC searches are untouched by this update. Still, as we noted earlier, mobile searches make up a huge portion of Google’s search traffic these days.
The idea behind the update makes sense: if you’re using, say, a smartphone to look up a topic, you’d probably rather be sent to pages designed for smartphones than swipe and pinch your way around a full-sized site. Of course, giving mobile-friendly webpages a priority in search rankings is only as useful as the content in them – if Google ends up dropping the priority of full-sized pages with better content, smartphone users are going to grab their pitchforks.
Google hasn’t forgotten how important content is and addressed it in a blog post announcing the update. “While the mobile-friendly change is important,” Google’s Takaki Makino and Doatam Phan said in the post, “The intent of the search query is still a very strong signal – so even if a page with high quality content is not mobile-friendly, it could still rank high if it has great content for the query.”
If you have a website and want to make sure Google’s search engine views its pages as mobile-friendly, you can test it easily enough with a free tool.
The idea behind the update makes sense: if you’re using, say, a smartphone to look up a topic, you’d probably rather be sent to pages designed for smartphones than swipe and pinch your way around a full-sized site. Of course, giving mobile-friendly webpages a priority in search rankings is only as useful as the content in them – if Google ends up dropping the priority of full-sized pages with better content, smartphone users are going to grab their pitchforks.
Google hasn’t forgotten how important content is and addressed it in a blog post announcing the update. “While the mobile-friendly change is important,” Google’s Takaki Makino and Doatam Phan said in the post, “The intent of the search query is still a very strong signal – so even if a page with high quality content is not mobile-friendly, it could still rank high if it has great content for the query.”
If you have a website and want to make sure Google’s search engine views its pages as mobile-friendly, you can test it easily enough with a free tool.
