Google tells you which websites are "Mobile Friendly".


Google tells you which websites are “Mobile-friendly”.

A couple of weeks ago I wrote a post about Google’s announcement on the importance of having a mobile friendly website design.

In a nutshell, from 21st April 2015, Google will be placing great emphasis on whether a website is ‘mobile-friendly’ and will rank your site for mobile devices accordingly. Google says it will have “a significant impact in our search results”.

Despite the fact that we are over a month away from the April ‘deadline’, here at M35 Web Design we are already seeing the impact.

Using a mobile device, do any search in Google and you can see whether the websites that appear in the results pages are optimised for mobile devices or not. Such sites have text right under their web address that says “Mobile-friendly” (see screenshot, left). If you search using a desktop computer you can’t see this text and, at the moment anyway, regardless of what you view it on the search results show up in virtually the same order for both mobile and desktop searches.

At the moment not all the top slots in a search are taken up by mobile-friendly websites, but I can envisage a time when they may well be, and not just for mobile devices.

However, the necessity to make your website mobile-friendly by the 21 April deadline might not be so pressing as Google’s announcement makes it seem.

Gary Illyes, from Google, has indicated that the mobile-friendly ranking signal will work in real time, and will be on a page-by-page basis. So if only some of your site is mobile-friendly, the parts that aren’t won’t necessarily hurt the whole of your site. Additionally, as soon as you make a page mobile-friendly, that will be reflected in Google’s search results.

M35 Web Design recommends that at the very least, the most important pages of a site should be made mobile-friendly first, and the rest as soon as possible.

As I write this, it still remains to be seen whether a mobile-friendly site with little useful content really will overtake another that is not seen as mobile-friendly, even though that might be packed with relevant and rich content that visitors would like. I’d like to think not. It also remains to be seen how long it will be before this also affects searches done on desktop computers (non-mobile devices).

Watch this space…!

Make sure Google sees your website as mobile-friendly. Contact M35 Web Design, in Poole, to find out how.

 

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