Google is constantly tweaking their search results, some times more than others. We’ve seen two updates in the last week, with domain names taking a back seat to site names, as well as Google now displaying potentially relevant Android apps in mobile search. Today, Google is drawing a line in the sand with sites that are ‘mobile-friendly’.
From today, Google will promote sites that have a mobile-friendly site, according to Google this means:
Now 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.
This update applies to individual pages not the whole site, all languages and only affects search on mobile devices.
There’s tools available for webmasters to check either pages on their site, or the whole site itself. Google will automatically crawl pages, and re-rank them as they become mobile friendly.
This is a great day for mobile users, although there’s still some pages that have terrible mobile versions and this won’t fix those problems – but it’s a start.
The best mobile sites are the ones with the “full site” button easily located near the top, or at least honour the “request desktop site” option in chrome. For some reason the scrolling on most “mobile friendly” sites is atrocious, leading to swipes registered as taps etc and many mis-clicks on adverts. Come to think of it, maybe that’s their intention in making the site so unresponsive.