Inside Search
The official Google Search blog
Ranking change to help you find mobile-friendly sites rolling out today
April 21, 2015
We’ve all been there: you’re on your phone and click through to a website, only to find it’s hard to read or burdensome to navigate because it isn’t formatted for a mobile screen. With mobile phones increasingly becoming the primary way for people to search the Internet, we want to ensure that when you search on Google you find content that is not just relevant and timely, but also easy to read and interact with on smaller mobile screens.
A lack of mobile friendliness is also a problem for web publishers: visitors abandon websites that aren’t mobile friendly at higher rates. And
research shows
74% of users say they are more likely to return to a mobile-friendly site.
That’s why we’ve been encouraging webmasters to create sites that avoid the pitfalls of small text and hard to navigate formatting in order to provide a great experience for mobile visitors to their pages. Back in November, we introduced a “
mobile-friendly badge
” to notify users when a link in search results led to a mobile friendly-page, and
provided resources
to help webmasters become mobile-friendly. And today we’re starting to roll out a change that
we announced
two months ago to take into account whether a site is mobile-friendly when we rank search results on mobile phones.
Note that this is just one of over 200 signals we use to evaluate the best results. Non-mobile-friendly sites won’t disappear from mobile Search results—they may still rank high if they hold great content the user wants.
If you use Google search on your mobile phone, you can now 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. In just the two months since we announced this change, we’ve seen a 4.7 percentage point uptick in the proportion of sites that are mobile friendly, and we hope to see even more in the coming months.
Our mobile ranking will now use mobile-friendliness as a signal that weighs in favor of pages that are formatted for mobile phones, like the image on the right.
The good news is that it doesn't have to be expensive or time-consuming: it could be as simple as adjusting website settings or picking out a design you like. Even if you opt to fully redesign your site, a small business website with 10-20 pages could be completed in a day or so.
Webmasters can check if their site is mobile-friendly by examining individual pages with the
Mobile-Friendly Test
or checking the status of the entire site through the
Mobile Usability report in Webmaster Tools
. Once a site
becomes mobile-friendly
, we will automatically re-process those pages (and webmasters can expedite the process by using
Fetch as Google with Submit to Index
).
Posted by Cody Kwok, Principal Software Engineer
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