This week Google, the gorilla of all search engines, rolled out their new algorithms affecting website searches and how websites are ranked in their Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). Google has expanded their use of mobile-friendliness of a website as a ranking signal. What does this mean to your website? Well, if your website, landing pages, or Blog are not fully optimized for mobile, then you may lose ranking to those sites that are optimized for mobile on mobile searches. According to Google, this update affects:
- Only search ranking on mobile devices
- Search results in all languages globally
- Applies to individual pages and not entire websites
According to Google’s Webmaster Central Blog, “While the mobile-friendly change is important, we still use a variety of signals to rank search results. 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“.
Google announced this change back in February on their Webmaster Central Blog and have since provided communication and tools to prepare developers and website owners of this looming change. Included with these tools is a website Mobile-Friendly Test Page to evaluate the mobile-friendliness of your website. To visit the test page and use the tool to see if you website is mobile friendly click HERE.
If you get a box that looks like the following image, then your site is not mobile friendly and may be negatively affected in the mobile SERP’s:
Call us today to discuss how Avid Design Group can help transition your HTML or WordPress website to meet the mobile-friendly programming criteria for the new Google mobile search algorithms. We can be contacted at (904) 806-5914, or info@aviddesigngroup.com.