Google’s mobile search algorithm has changing to emphasize web sites that are mobile-friendly. What does this mean for your website? If your site isn’t optimized and easy to use for mobile users, it will likely get less traffic and go down in the search rankings when people use their mobile devices.
A site is mobile-friendly if it’s fast loading, features readable text without zooming, properly sizes content and photos so the user doesn’t have to scroll sideways, and has links that are easy to click.
Google warned back in February that the change “will have a significant impact in our search results.”
Mobile searches are only growing in popularity. According to ZDNet, “Google is believed to get about half its search traffic from mobile devices. One of the company’s top search execs said in 2014 that he expected the number of mobile searches to top desktop queries that year.”
Google’s new algorithm will help find relevant mobile content in two ways:
Site rank will be changed to emphasize mobile-friendliness and will affect mobile searches worldwide in all languages. Mobile users will then have access to sites that have quick loading times, readable text, and top down scrolling rather than side scrolling.
They will also use information from indexed apps in rankings for signed-in-users with the app installed. This app content will also be ranked more prominently in search. For more information on this, they offer a step-by-step-guide at https://developers.google.com.
If you want to see if your site is considered mobile-friendly, Google offers a Mobile-Friendly Test at http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/mobile-friendly.