WebProNews

Tag: Mobile-Friendly

  • Survey Looks At Sites’ Readiness For Google’s Mobile-Friendly Signal

    Survey Looks At Sites’ Readiness For Google’s Mobile-Friendly Signal

    Google is about to launch its previously announced mobile-friendly ranking signal on April 21. gShift has released some new survey findings about industry sentiment and readiness for the update. It finds that digital marketers have mixed views on whether or not it will impact their business.

    They surveyed 275 digital marketers across the retail, travel, and automotive industries. It’s a limited sample, but big enough to acknowledge, I think. Over 65% of participants were senior level decision-makers.

    Over half (52%) believe their business will be affected by the update, but 20% said it won’t impact their business. 28% said they were unsure.

    More than 65% answered “affirmatively” to the question, “Is your company factoring in mobile strategies for SEO and content marketing in order to accommodate mobile search since learning about this change from Google?” At the same time, 20% said they are going to wait and see.

    It’s worth noting that Google has indicated that the mobile-friendly ranking signal will run in real time, and will run on a page-by-page basis. In other words, if only some of your site is mobile-friendly, the parts that aren’t won’t necessarily hurt the entirety of your site. Also, as soon as you make a page mobile-friendly, that will be reflected in Google’s algorithm.

    On the other hand, Google is also currently being called out for giving webmasters contradicting information about this kind of things, so who knows what to believe?

    35% of the survey’s participants said mobile makes up between 11-50%of their website traffic.

    In response to the question, “Do you think your website is currently mobile friendly?” over 68% answered yes. About half said they don’t use any tools to track their keyword rankings on desktop versus mobile.

    gShift also put out this infographic:

    If your site isn’t mobile-friendly yet, and you haven’t gotten started looking into how to improve it, you can start here for a look at what Google specifically tells webmasters to do. The article will point you to all the necessary links for Google’s own documentation.

    Google also has this hour-long Q&A session on the topic available:

    Google also recently named some specific things to avoid for a mobile-friendly site. These include: blocked JavaScript, CSS and image files; unplayable content; faulty redirects; mobile-only 404s; app download interstitials; irrelevant cross-links; and slow mobile pages.

    And in case you missed it, Bing also looks to mobile-friendliness as a ranking signal, so if you prepare for Google’s algorithm change, it’s bound to help you in Microsoft’s search engine as well.

    Images via gShift

  • Bing Wants Your Site To Be Mobile-Friendly Too

    Bing Wants Your Site To Be Mobile-Friendly Too

    Let’s be honest, if you weren’t planning on making your site mobile-friendly for Google, you probably aren’t going to for Bing, but if you do make your site mobile-friendly, which is obviously good for users in addition to search engines, you might find that you do get some better rankings in Bing as an added bonus. You should also find that Bing tells users your site is indeed mobile-friendly when they happen a across it in search results.

    As you’re probably aware, Google is about to implement an algorithm change that makes the mobile-friendliness of a website a signal in its rankings. If your site is mobile-friendly by Google’s standards, you might get a boost in rankings. If it’s not, you might get a big drop in rankings. It’s just one of many signals Google takes into account, but it’s an important one. Google clearly wants to give its users a good experience, and more and more of those users are on mobile devices more frequently than before. The signal is supposed to launch on April 21, which is coming right up.

    Microsoft announced mobile-friendliness as a ranking signal back in November, but it is now labeling results as “mobile-friendly” just like Google started doing last year as it prepared to get sites ready for the algorithmic adjustment (h/t: Search Engine Roundtable).

    “Traditionally, Bing wasn’t heavily relying on specific device and platform signals to provide web results to the user. You would get similar results on your PC, Mac, or smartphone for most of your searches,” said Bing principal program manager Mir Rosenberg in a blog post in November. “However, we live in a mobile-first, cloud-first world and we need to think about our users’ search experience on mobile devices differently. As a result, we’ve been really intensifying how we look at web results across these mobile devices. We have a long and exciting journey ahead of us, but as a very first step in this long-term investment, we started probing web pages for “mobile friendliness” and ranking web pages accordingly on our users’ mobile phones.”

    They showed this example to give you an idea of how search results would change as a result of the mobile-friendly signal:

    “In this example, we know which pages are mobile-friendly so automatically rank them higher with the new update, whereas previously the searcher would have had a much bigger change of landing on a non-mobile friendly page or possibly had to wait for a redirect to a mobile-friendly page,” wrote Rosenberg. “As always, there are many ranking factors at play — and mobile raking has its fair share of Secret Squirrel stuff — but here are some of the things that we do to improve mobile relevance: We identify and classify mobile and device-friendly web pages and websites; We analyze web documents from a mobile point-of-view by looking at content compatibility, content readability [and] mobile functionality (to weed out “junk”, that is pages that are 404 on mobile or Flash only etc.); Return more mobile-friendly URLs to the mobile SERP; Ranking the results pages based on all of the above.”

    There’s a good chance you missed Bing’s news in November, because Bing just doesn’t command the attention that Google does since its share of the search market is so much smaller. Still, there are a lot of people that do use it, and it does also power Yahoo Search (at least for the time being). At this point in time, by the way, Yahoo does not display a mobile-friendly label in search results.

    Now that Google has lit a fire under webmasters’ butts, it’s good to know that improvements made to sites for Google should also help these same sites in Bing.

    If your site isn’t mobile-friendly yet, and you haven’t gotten started looking into how to improve it, you can start here for a look at what Google specifically tells webmasters to do. The article will point you to all the necessary links for Google’s own documentation.

    You might also want to watch this Q&A session Google released on the subject. It’s an hour long, so you know there’s a great deal to consider.

    Google also recently named some specific things to avoid for a mobile-friendly site. These include: blocked JavaScript, CSS and image files; unplayable content; faulty redirects; mobile-only 404s; app download interstitials; irrelevant cross-links; and slow mobile pages.

    On that last note, Moz just put out a really good article that will help you address the speed factor.

    While we’re on the topic of getting traffic from Bing, the search engine also announced some changes to image search, which it says will improve your traffic.

    Images via Bing

  • Google Says More About Mobile-Friendly Ranking Signal

    Google Says More About Mobile-Friendly Ranking Signal

    About a month ago, Google announced that it would begin using mobile-friendliness as a ranking signal starting on April 21. This gave webmasters some time to prepare to avoid potentially devastating effects in search results. This is a major update considering that people are only searching Google more frequently from their mobile devices.

    Google algorithm changes have ruined businesses in the past, so it was good of the company to give some warning on this one. They don’t always do that. It’s going to be interesting to see what sites end up taking a substantial hit when the time comes. Most well-known sites should be ready.

    Ricardo at DigiDay writes, “Top publishers, for the most part, appear prepared for the change. Out of the U.S. publishers in comScore’s top-100 rankings, the vast majority of them — including About.com, The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, pass Google’s mobile-friendly test.”

    He notes that sites like Mail Online and Weather.com have homepages that don’t pass Googles mobile-friendly test, but also that Mail Online’s article pages do. This is probably enough for the site to not take major it. As we recently learned, the update works on a page-by-page basis as opposed to a side-wide one.

    Googles’ Gary Illyes recently said as much at the Search Marketing Expo. He also said the signal would run in real time. If only parts of your site are mobile-friendly, the parts that aren’t shouldn’t hurt them. This eases the burden on webmasters who ay have thought they needed to have their entire sites mobile-friendly by the algorithm update’s launch date. It’s still a good idea, of course, but as long as you take care of your most important pages, you’ll probably be fine.

    On Tuesday, Google hosted a live Q&A Session to answer questions about the mobile-friendly ranking change. Here’s the whole thing if you want to spend an hour of your time on it:

    Barry Schwartz at Search Engine Roundtable has been pulling out some nuggets that are helpful to know. For example, while this is pretty much common sense, may be helpful to see it confirmed: If your site carries the “mobile-friendly” label in Google’s search results (it’s been displaying this label since last year), you shouldn’t have anything to worry about. The quote from the video:

    Take out your phone, look up your web site. See if there is a gray mobile friendly label in your description snippet. If it is in the search results, if you see it, that means that Google understands that your site is mobile friendly and if you don’t see it then we don’t see that your site is mobile friendly or your is not mobile friendly.

    Another helpful thing to know is that information in the mobile usability report can sometimes be delayed. From the video:

    It might not be the most updated information. So if you did change your site and you want to see if we detected it, run it through the mobile friendly test. The mobile usability report will catch up when it crawls.

    One more important point Google clarified in the video is that there aren’t different degrees of mobile-friendliness when it comes to the ranking signal. Pages will either be seen as mobile-friendly or not. From the video:

    You either have a mobile friendly page or not. It is based on the criteria we mentioned earlier, which are small font sizes, your tap targets/links to your buttons are too close together, readable content and your viewpoint. So if you have all of those and your site is mobile friendly then you benefit from the ranking change.

    As they went on to say, Google still has over 200 different ranking factors, so the mobile-friendly signal is still just one of them, and will work in conjunction with everything else.

    While the algorithm update will begin on April 21, Google says it could take a couple of days to a week to fully roll out.

    There are a variety of factors that go into making your pages mobile-friendly. If your site isn’t in good shape, you’re going to want to make friends with Google’s mobile SEO guide, and of course the mobile friendly test. You can get a summary of both of these here.

    Google has also been giving tips on things you’ll want to avoid. More on that here.

    Don’t forget, the mobile-friendly signal is only one of two mobile-related algorithm changes Google announced. The other one has already gone into effect, and looks at content within apps. If you use app indexing for Android apps, your content may show up higher in search results for signed in users who have your app installed. More on getting set up for that here.

    Google also recently announced another ranking signal that isn’t necessarily mobile-related. The company said earlier this month that it would launch a ranking adjustment to better address doorway pages.

    Image via Google

  • Things To Avoid For Google’s Mobile-Friendly Update

    Things To Avoid For Google’s Mobile-Friendly Update

    Last month, Google announced a pair of new mobile-related ranking signals for its search algorithm. One is mobile-friendliness and the other is for content from apps that users have installed on their phones. You can learn more about taking advantage of the latter here.

    Are you looking forward to the mobile-friendly update? Is your site ready to go? Let us know in the comments.

    The mobile-friendly signal will take a number of things into account. In a recent article, we went through a bunch of these things based on Google’s own guidance and documentation about how to make a site mobile-friendly. Now, Google is telling webmasters some specific things to avoid in a document called “Avoid common mistakes“. These include:

    1. Blocked JavaScript, CSS and image files

    2. Unplayable content

    3. Faulty redirects

    4. Mobile-only 404s

    5. App download interstitials

    6. Irrelevant cross-links

    7. Slow mobile pages.

    Blocked JavaScript, CSS and Image Files

    Google says to always allow Googlebot acess to the JavaScript, CSS, and image files used by your site so it can see it like an average user. If your robots.txt file disallows crawling of these, Google says it “directly harms” how well it can render and index your content, which can result in “suboptimal rankings”.

    Google says to make sure it can crawl this stuff by using the “Fetch as Google” feature in Webmaster Tools, which will let you see how Googlebot sees and renders your content, and will help you figure out and fix issues. Then check and test your robots.txt in WMT, and test your mobile pages with the Mobile-Friendly Test. If you use separate URLs for mobile and desktop, make sure to test both.

    Unplayable Content

    When your content uses videos or other media that’s not supported on mobile devices (like Flash), users will see a message like this:

    Obviously that’s not good for users, so you’re going to want to make sure your content is playable on mobile devices. You can avoid unplayable content by using HTML5 standard tags.

    “For animated content rendered using Flash or other multimedia players, consider using HTML5 animations that work across all web browsers. Google Web Designer makes it easy to create these animations in HTML5,” Google says. “Use HTML5 standards for animations to provide a good experience to all your users. Use video-embedding that’s playable on all devices. Consider having the transcript of the video available. This will make your site accessible to people who use assistive browsing technologies or who have browsers that cannot play a proprietary video format.”

    Faulty Redirects

    Google has been notifying webmasters about fixing faulty redirects since last summer.

    Basically, if you have separate mobile URLs, you need to redirect mobile users to the appropriate mobile URL on each desktop version. Don’t redirect to other pages (like the homepage). Google gives you some specific examples of what not to do here.

    You can set up your server so it redirects smartphone users to the equivalent URL on your smartphone site, and if a page on the site doesn’t have an equivalent, you can keep them on the desktop page. You can also, of course, use responsive design.

    Mobile-only 404s

    You also don’t want to show mobile users 404s for pages that work fine on the desktop.

    “To ensure the best user experience, if you recognize a user is visiting a desktop page from a mobile device and you have an equivalent mobile page at a different URL, redirect them to that URL instead of serving a 404 or a soft 404 page,” says Google. “Also make sure that the mobile-friendly page itself is not an error page.”

    Google also sends notifications about this in Webmaster Tools, and again, if you have a smartphone site on a separate URL, you can set up your server so it redirects smartphone users to the equivalent URL on the smartphone site. Google notes that if you use dynamic serving, you should make sure your user-agent detection is correctly configured. If the page doesn’t have a smartphone equivalent, keep users on the desktop version. You can also use responsive design.

    Be sure to check the Crawl Errors report in WMT. You’ll find problem pages in the Smartphone tab.

    App Download Interstitials

    Google says you should avoid using interstitials for promoting your mobile app because it can cause indexing issues and “disrupt a visitor’s usage of the site”. Instead, it says to use a simple banner to promote the app within the page’s content using native browser and operating system support (such as Smart App Banners for Safari) or an HTML banner or image like a typical small advertisement, which links to the app store for download.

    Irrelevant Cross-Links

    “A common practice when a website serves users on separate mobile URLs is to have links to the desktop-optimized version, and likewise a link from the desktop page to the mobile page,” Google says. “A common error is to have links point to an irrelevant page such as having the mobile pages link to the desktop site’s homepage.”

    Just check your links to make sure they point to the right equivalent page. It’s that simple.

    Slow Mobile Pages

    Google stresses the importance of making sure mobile pages load quickly. Google has placed a great deal of emphasis on page speed for quite a while now, and thats’ no different when it comes to mobile-friendliness.

    To make sure your pages are fast enough, you can use Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool, which will tell if you what (if any) issues are slowing them down. If it says “should fix,” you should follow that advice.

    Google has a series of articles on optimizing performance here, and points to this article from bryan McQuade about making mobile pages render in under one second. You can also read through this page on PageSpeed Insights.

    Google also ran a poll asking people what they dislike most when browsing the web on their mobile devices. Page speed was by far the biggest annoyance:

    Google’s mobile-friendly algorithm update will begin rolling on on April 21. Webmasters are no doubt scrambling to make sure their sites are ready in time, but the good news is that if your site isn’t ready by then, it’s not a huge deal. Google recently indicated that the ranking signal will run in real time, and will run on a page-by-page basis, so if only some parts of your site are mobile-friendly, the parts that aren’t won’t necessarily hurt your whole site. As soon as you make those parts mobile-friendly, it will be reflected in the algorithm.

    Do you think this update will make the search experience significantly better? Will this be a positive for businesses? Discuss.

    Images via Google

  • How To Make Your Site Mobile-Friendly, According To Google

    How To Make Your Site Mobile-Friendly, According To Google

    As you’re probably aware, Google is preparing to launch an algorithm change that includes a signal telling Google sites that are mobile-friendly should get a rankings boost. This will remain just one of many signals Google takes into account when ranking content, but it’s going to be an important one.

    Is your site already mobile-friendly or do you have some work to do? Let us know in the comments.

    For one, if it were not important, Google probably wouldn’t have taken the time to pre-announce it on multiple occasions. It probably also wouldn’t be sending webmasters messages about their sites when they’re not mobile friendly. Even forgetting Google’s own messaging, it’s just common sense that this is an important signal. Many, many people spend the majority of their Internet time on their mobile devices, and many others still spend some of it that way. Mobile is not going away. If your site isn’t mobile-friendly, you’re doing yourself and your potential customers a disservice, regardless of how Google is ranking your content.

    “When it comes to search on mobile devices, users should get the most relevant and timely results, no matter if the information lives on mobile-friendly web pages or apps. As more people use mobile devices to access the internet, our algorithms have to adapt to these usage patterns,” Google says.

    The mobile-friendliness ranking signal will take effect starting April 21. Yes, Google has even given a date. That’s how serious they are about this one. They say it will affect mobile searches in all languages worldwide, and have “a significant impact” in search results.

    So you have less than two months to make sure your site is ready to go before the update starts to roll out. How should you go about doing that? Well, you might want to start by utilizing Google’s Mobile-Friendly test tool. Use this to test individual URLs. If you have a basic template that’s used for the majority of your site’s content, that will probably help a great deal, but use it to test as much of your site as is realistic.

    First, go here. You may want to bookmark it if you have some work to do.

    Enter your URL, and hit “analyze”. Hopefully you’ll get something that looks like this, telling you your page is mobile-friendly:

    If the page is deemed mobile-friendly, Google tell you how Googlebot sees the page. It might say something like, “This page uses 9 resources which are blocked by robots.txt. The results and screenshot may be incorrect.”

    It will give you a link to expand such resources and get a look at what they actually are. It also gives you a link to learn how to unblock them for Googlebot.

    If your URL is not deemed mobile-friendly, Google will tell you specific reasons, as well as info about how Googlebot sees it, and resources to help you fix issues. Reasons a page isn’t mobile friendly might include things like: “content wider than screen,” “uses incompatible plugins,” “links too close together,” “text too small to read,” “mobile viewport not set,” etc.

    Google recommends the following platforms for creating new sites, and chances are you’re already using one of them: WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, Blogger, vBulletin, Tumblr, DataLife Engine, Magento, Prestashop, Bitrix, and Google Sites. Google provides a dedicated guide for each one of these platforms for making your site mobile-friendly. You can find each of these here.

    Google also gives the general guidelines of backing up your site before making any changes, updating your CMS to the latest version, making sure any custom themes you’re using are mobile-friendly, and reviewing support forums for the CMS to see what issues people might be having with the mobile versions of their sites

    To make sure a custom theme is mobile-friendly, view the theme from the admin panel of your CMS and look for words like “mobile” or “responsive” in the documentation, and if there’s a demo template available, put the URL into Google’s mobile-friendly test tool. Google also suggests making sure the template is fast by checking the Speed section of PageSpeed Insights and making sure the Speed section has no issues marked as “should fix”.

    To get into the technical details of making a site mobile-friendly, you’re going to want to take a look at the documentation on Google’s Web Fundamentals site. Here, you’ll find options for your first multi-device site and starting your site with the Web Starter kit.

    The former delves into creating your content and structure and making it responsive. The TL;DR of content creation as Google breaks it down, is: Identify the content you need first; Sketch out information architecture for narrow and wide viewports; and Create a skeleton view of the page with content but without styling. The TL;DR for making it responsive is as follows: Always use a viewport; Always start with a narrow viewport first and scale out; Base your breakpoints off when you need to adapt the content; and Create a high-level vision of your layout across major breakpoints.

    The Web Starter Kit section is broken into three parts: Set Up Web Starter Kit, Development Phases, and How to Use the Style Guide.

    Of course even though these documents are long, you’re probably still going to want to read them.

    Then there’s the Mobile SEO guide. This is separated into four parts: Choose your mobile configuration; Signal your configuration to search engines; Avoid common mistakes; and Configure for other devices.

    The “Choose your mobile configuration” section deals with understanding different devices and key points in going mobile, selecting mobile configuration, and answers frequently asked questions. The “Signal your configuration to search engine” section talks about responsive web design, dynamic serving, and separate URLs.

    The “common mistakes” part talks about blocking JavaScript, CSS and image files, unplayable content, faulty redirects, mobile-only 404s, app download interstitials, irrelevant cross-links, and slow mobile pages. That last part talks about configuring for tablets and feature phones (when Google says mobile, it’s referring to smartphones).

    This whole mobile SEO guide is far too extensive to get into here, but you do need to know about it, and you’re going to want to go through it and make sure you’re not overlooking anything.

    “Design your site to help make it easier for your customer to complete their most common tasks: from task conception, to visiting your site, to task completion,” Google says. “Outline the potential steps in your customers’ journey to make sure the steps are easy to complete on a mobile device. Try to streamline the experience and reduce the number of user interactions.”

    “Making a mobile site requires prioritization,” it says. “Start by working out what the most important and common tasks are for your customers on mobile. Being able to support these tasks is critical and this is why the measure of your mobile site is how well customers can complete their objectives. There are ways to make the design of your site support ease of use too. Focus on consistency in your interface and providing an unified experience across platforms.”

    Many site owners are simply going to have to get outside help. Google knows this, and also offers advice for working with developers. While Google elaborates here, it recommends asking to see your developer’s references and portfolio of mobile sites, making sure they understand your mobile customer, asking them to make a commitment to speed, having them install web analytics, making sure they’re aware of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines, and making sure the contract includes improving the mobile site after the initial launch.

    It’s entirely possible to make a site mobile-friendly for no extra money. This is the case if you have skills required to implement the steps from Google’s guides discussed above or if you are able to use a responsive theme. Things can get more expensive if you have to hire the developer, so some sites are going to have to make a big choice.

    Google says the top three mistakes beginners will want to avoid when it comes to creating a mobile-friendly site, are: forgetting their mobile customer; implementing the mobile site on a different domain, subdomain, or subdirectory from the desktop site; and working in isolation rather than looking around for inspiration. In other words, keep an eye on what others are doing.

    Google has additional resources available with its Mobile Playbook, Think with Google for the Mobile Platform, and its Multi-Screen Success Stories.

    Having a mobile-friendly site is good for more than just Google rankings. It’s good for your site visitors, and could mean the difference in getting a conversion or not. The search visibility will also help in that area, and it’s also likely that it will end up helping you in other search engines besides Google. None of them are going to want to point their users to inefficient pages.

    Do you plan on making changes to your website due to Google’s coming change? Let us know in the comments.

    Images via Google

  • Get Ready For Google’s New Mobile Ranking Signal

    Get Ready For Google’s New Mobile Ranking Signal

    Throughout the course of last year, Google made a bunch of moves showing that it was focusing on improving the mobile search experience for its users by way of getting websites (otherwise known as search results) to make themselves more mobile-friendly.

    In November, Google added a “mobile-friendly” label to mobile search results for sites that deserve such a title. It also said it was experimenting with using the same criteria that would earn a site the label for a ranking signal to give mobile-friendly sites even more love in the search results.

    Are you concerned about Google’s potential mobile-friendly ranking signal? Is this a positive step for Google? Let us know what you think in the comments.

    Now, webmasters are getting warnings from Google when their sites aren’t mobile-friendly, which may suggest that Google is about to implement that ranking signal. According to Barry Schwartz at Search Engine Roundtable, who says several of his clients received the warning over the weekend, these are being sent out at mass scale by way of email and Webmaster Tools.

    Schwartz shows a screenshot of one of the warnings, which says, “Fix mobile usability issues found on http://www…..” and then:

    Google systems have tested 3,670 pages from your site and found that 100% of them have critical mobile usability errors. The errors on these 3,670 pages severely affect how mobile users are able to experience your website. These pages will not be seen as mobile-friendly by Google Search, and will therefore be displayed and ranked appropriately for smartphone users.

    The message goes on to tell the webmaster to find problematic pages, learn about mobile-friendly design, and fix the mobile usability issues on the site. There is a link to view a report on the non-mobile-friendly pages, as well as one point to Google’s mobile-friendly guidelines. It also has links to a guide to making a CMS mobile-friendly, a page on Google’s Developer site about building mobile-friendly sites, and the Webmaster Central Forum, where webmasters are encouraged to ask more questions.

    Here’s another of the messages Martin Oxby shared on Twitter:

    Schwartz says Google had previously only notified sites that were “supposedly mobile friendly” when they had usability issues, but now they’re targeting sites that just aren’t at all mobile-friendly.

    The mobile-friendly labels should be fully rolled out on a global basis by now. In mid-November, Google said it was rolling it out over the next few weeks. When the company made the announcement, it also laid out some criteria for earning the label as detected by Googlebot.

    For one, a site should avoid software that isn’t common on mobile devices. It specifically mentioned Flash as an example. This actually follows Google’s previous shaming of Flash sites in mobile search results. Last summer, Google started showing messages for results that may not work in mobile results, such as “Uses Flash. May not work on your device.”

    Google says sites should use text that is readable without zooming, and should size content to the screen so that users don’t have to scroll horizontally or zoom. Links should also be placed far enough apart so that the correct one can be tapped easily.

    Google has a Mobile-Friendly Test tool here, which webmasters should find particularly helpful. You can simply enter a URL, and Google will analyze it and report if it has a mobile-friendly design.

    If a URL passes the test, it will tell you that the page is mobile-friendly, and give you some additional resources, including information about how Googlebot sees the page.

    If the URL fails the test, you’ll get reasons why the page isn’t mobile-friendly, as well as info about how Googlebot sees it, and resources to help you fix issues.

    After Google gave the news about using mobile-freindly as a ranking signal in November, the company said it would continue to use desktop signals for ranking mobile results. Google’s John Mueller said this in a Webmaster Central mobile office hours hangout:

    We need to focus on the desktop page for the search results for the most part. That’s also the one that you use with the rel canonical. As we pick up more information from mobile-friendly pages or from mobile pages in general, then I would expect that to flow into the rankings as well. So that’s something to keep in mind there.

    I’d still make sure that your mobile friendly pages are as fast as possible, that they work really well on mobile devices, that you’re going past just essentially the required minimum that we had with the mobile friendly tool, and really providing a great experience on mobile. Because lots of people are using mobile to kind of make their decisions, to read content, and if your site is kind of minimally usable on mobile, but really a bad user experience, really, really slow, then that’s something that users will notice as well and they’ll jump off and do something else or go to a different site.

    You can listen to him talk about that subject about 18 minutes and 50 seconds into the following video.

    Google has been asking random mobile users to rate their search results based on a five-star rating system ranging from poor to excellent.


    Last fall, Google Webmaster Tools added mobile usability tracking. This includes graphs that look at mobile issues over time, so you can see any progress you’ve made.

    Muller had this to say when announcing that: “A mobile-friendly site is one that you can easily read & use on a smartphone, by only having to scroll up or down. Swiping left/right to search for content, zooming to read text and use UI elements, or not being able to see the content at all make a site harder to use for users on mobile phones. To help, the Mobile Usability reports show the following issues: Flash content, missing viewport (a critical meta-tag for mobile pages), tiny fonts, fixed-width viewports, content not sized to viewport, and clickable links/buttons too close to each other.”

    “We strongly recommend you take a look at these issues in Webmaster Tools, and think about how they might be resolved; sometimes it’s just a matter of tweaking your site’s template!” he added.

    Google continues to look for ways to improve Webmaster Tools as the nature of search results continues to shift. Last week, it launched a new structured data tool to help webmasters author and publish markup on their sites. The company says it will better reflect Google’s interpretation of your site.

    Google is also asking webmasters for some ideas for new tools and features. The company wants to know what people want from it in 2015, and has a Google Moderator page where you can add your own suggestions or vote on others.

    What would you like to see Google add to Webmaster Tools? Let us know in the comments.

  • Google Adds ‘Mobile-Friendly’ Label To Results, Gives Sites Ranking Boost

    Google Adds ‘Mobile-Friendly’ Label To Results, Gives Sites Ranking Boost

    Update: Google’s official announcement is now live.

    Much of Google’s work in search this year, as well as its guidance for webmasters, has been related to mobile search. Google has really ramped up its efforts of late to improve the mobile search experience, as more and more people perform more and more searches from their smartphones.

    Now, the company is putting a special emphasis on sites that are “mobile-friendly,” while giving them possible ranking boosts.

    Barry Schwartz at Search Engine Land reports (we’re not seeing the official announcement on the web just yet) that Google has officially launched the mobile-friendly label in mobile search results, while Danny Sullivan says Google is “experimenting” with giving sites that have earned the label “some type of special treatment within its ranking algorithm”.

    Sullivan shares this quote from a Google post, which doesn’t appear to be live yet: “We see these labels as a first step in helping mobile users to have a better mobile web experience. We are also experimenting with using the mobile-friendly criteria as a ranking signal.”

    According to Schwartz’s report, sites can earn the label by avoiding software that’s not common on mobile devices (such as Flash), using readable (without zooming) text, sizing content to the screen so users don’t have to scroll horizontally or zoom, and placing links far enough apart so the right one can easily be tapped.

    Menawhile, Google is asking mobile users to rate search results.

    A couple weeks ago, Google announced a new feature in Webmaster Tools to help webmasters track mobile usability.

    Prior to that, it had been notifying webmasters about sites with faulty redirects in mobile results to save users the “common annoyance” of tapping a search result only to be redirected to a site’s mobile homepage. Google has also been noting when pages “may not work on your device” because of things like Flash.

    Images via Google