Google will be dropping the familiar “Mobile-friendly” tag from all mobile friendly results when someone does a search on a mobile device.
With 85% of the mobile search results are now mobile friendly, it makes sense that this move would happen to declutter the search results and leave a cleaner look. With the majority of the pages being mobile friendly already, the tag is a bit redundant and not as useful as it was when the majority of pages were not mobile friendly.
Google is still keeping the mobile friendly ranking boost. But you will no longer be able to use the mobile friendly tag to tell if a page is mobile friendly or not. When the change goes into effect, site owners will need to use Google’s mobile friendly test to confirm if a page is mobile friendly or not.
This also means that there will be room for a longer description in the search results, now that Google is removing the “Mobile-Friendly” tag from the front of each description that is mobile friendly. Those are keywords and/or characters that many SEOs will be happy to have back.
Jennifer Slegg
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