Google has been putting the pressure on webmasters to ensure their websites are as mobile friendly as possible. With mobile searches nearly edging out desktop for overall percentage of searches, Google wants to ensure that their users are getting the best overall search experience as possible.
Now, Google has begun displaying “Mobile-friendly” tags at the start of the description of all websites in the search results that are mobile friendly, when the searcher is searching from a mobile device. This change is meant to help searchers and save them time from clicking on a search result that does not have a good user experience on mobile.
Many SEOs have considered it just a matter of time before mobile-friendly sites were given some kind of boost within mobile-only search results, as it does make sense for Google to serve the best mobile results to those searchers. And Google confirms that they are currently experimenting with using mobile friendliness as a ranking signal. If Google has the tag available, and it knows which sites are mobile friendly, it makes a lot more sense for the Google to be showing those results above websites that art mobile friendly.
However strong the ranking signal might be, is unknown. But Google has previously announced ranking signal changes, such as making a site secure, that didn’t end up being as much of a boost as anticipated.
Google has really been pushing the mobile user experience on webmasters, particularly over the past year, because mobile is a very dominant force in search and the search share continues to rise. In August, Google began warning webmasters when their sites were redirecting mobile users to the homepage, as opposed to the internal page they were clicking on in the search results
In July, Google began placing an alert within their search results for any website that uses Flash, when the search was on a mobile device, as many mobile devices will not render Flash. And just last month, Google expanded this internationally.
With the addition of Google’s mobile usability errors being added to Google webmaster tools, became a lot easier for novice webmasters to figure out what problems they had with mobile and how to understand and fix them.
The tags are currently available in English, and they plan to roll it out to additional languages within the next few weeks.
Jennifer Slegg
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[…] sites by Google, particularly in the last year, many SEOs have been expecting last year that an additional mobile-only algorithm to begin affecting non-mobile friendly sites at some point. They added mobile tools to Google Webmaster Tools to assist webmasters in making their sites […]