Amanda Haskew, Papercut Interactive
It’s no secret that Google wants to make the search experience better for mobile users. Last April, they launched their famous Mobilegeddon update, which aimed to promote mobile friendly sites in search results on mobile devices. More recently, Google announced the development of Accelerated Mobile Pages. This initiative is used to improve the mobile browsing experience by speeding up page load times for news sites. Well, the web world is buzzing again, and Google has even more changes lined up that illustrate its commitment to providing users with an optimal mobile search experience.
New Warnings to Site Owners
If you own a site that isn’t mobile friendly, you may have noticed warnings in your Search Console before. Now, Google has also integrated these warnings directly into mobile search results. It’s important to note that these warnings only appear to site owners who have registered their websites in Search Console and who are logged into their Google accounts while searching. To learn more about these warnings and see what they look like in the wild, check out this Search Engine Land blog or the original post on Jennifer Slegg’s blog.
Boosting Mobile Friendly Update Factors
Aside from adding these new warnings for site owners, Google is furthering its commitment to mobile friendliness by boosting its mobile friendly ranking signals. According to Search Engine Land, this update is scheduled to begin rolling out in May, and it should be a slow, gradual change. Like the original Mobilegeddon update, this May update is page by page, meaning Google will evaluate each page on your site individually, rewarding those that are mobile friendly and penalizing those that aren’t. And, like Mobilegeddon, it only affects mobile search results. Its overall impact, however, is expected to be smaller.
What to Do Now
The good news is, if you have a mobile friendly website, you’re in the clear. If you’re not mobile ready, it’s time to start moving that way. At Papercut, we recommend responsive designs as a mobile solution. You can read more about why here, but I’ll sum it up by saying that responsive sites provide all the same content to each user, regardless of device. They also have leave less room for coding errors and eliminate the extra workload of separate mobile sites.
If you need more information about what Google defines as mobile friendly, or if you need to see if your site is mobile ready, check out the mobile friendly tool and Google’s mobile friendly guidelines.
Content originally appeared on Papercut Interactive's blog. For more, visit papercutinteractive.com/blog.
