As part of an effort to chime with the progressively mobile times, Google made a significant change to their ranking system this week by giving web pages that haven't been optimised for smartphones, tablets and other mobile devices a lower ranking on their ubiquitous search engine. The update was launched on Tuesday (April 21), and was christened as “Mobilegeddon” by the internet at large. We all first learned of these plans back in February, and whilst it's unprecedented for Google to pre-announce such a large algorithmic change, they did so in order to give publishers ample time to alter their sites before the changes came into effect.
Google made a significant change to their ranking system this week by giving web pages that haven't been optimised for mobile devices a lower ranking on their search engine
The company's longstanding algorithms have been changed to include a site's “Mobile friendliness” as a measure when returning search query results. Of course, this doesn't necessarily mean that non-mobile friendly sites will end up cast from page 1 to page 100, as a pages content quality, popularity and relevancy will still (of course) be taken into consideration, and the updates will only affect searches actually made on smart phones (not tablets yet). However, mobile compatibility will now play a more significant factor, and considering how popular smart phones and tablets have become in the past few years, it's probably about time!
Longstanding algorithms have been changed to include a site's “Mobile friendliness” as a measure when returning search query results
The idea is to encourage developers to make their sites more mobile friendly, and to make the mobile Google experience more convenient and effective. A statement posted on Google's Webmaster Central Blog, states that: “Now (mobile) searchers can more easily find high-quality and relevant results where text is readable without tapping or zooming, tap targets are spaced appropriately, and the page avoids unplayable content or horizontal scrolling.” Considering the amount of time people tend to spend browsing the internet on their phones, this could prove a godsend for anyone who refuses to go to the toilet without taking their smartphone along for the ride.
The idea is to encourage developers to make their sites more mobile friendly, and to make the mobile Google experience more convenient and effective
Google have created a handy “Mobile-Friendly Test” to help site owners check just how mobile-friendly their webpages are by typing the url of each page into the included search engine. They can also check their entire site by using the Mobile Usability report in Google's Webmaster Tools section. If changes are made to make a site more mobile-friendly, Google will automatically re-process the changed pages and alter their rankings accordingly, and if you can't wait, the process can be expedited by asking Google to re-crawl and index your pages via the Submit to Index function of the Fetch as Google tool.
A handy “Mobile-Friendly Test” has been created to help site owners check just how mobile-friendly their webpages are
Over the past few months, Google has published several tips for Webmasters looking to up their site's mobile-friendliness. These guides offer advice on a wide range of topics, such as how site owners can customise a site that uses a content management system, how they can customise home page and site navigation, and how to enable easier form entry on a mobile device. Several weeks ago, Google published a list of typical mistakes that site owners tend to make when serving up content to mobile devices. Common problems listed included faulty redirects, mobile-only error messages and blocked images. So it's not like we haven't been warned and prepared for the coming amobilleypse (OK so that one's not quite as catchy as Mobilegeddon). What are your thoughts on the changes? As per usual, sound off below!
