Google advising websites to use HTML5 instead of Flash for multimedia is nothing new. What is new is that it can directly cost you search rankings now.
As you’ve probably hears by now, Google announced a new ranking signal based on websites’ mobile-friendliness. This went into effect beginning earlier this week, though it may take a week or to to completely roll out.
There are a lot of reasons your webpages may register as non-mobile-friendly, but one that is sure to be a problem is the use of Flash.
“Avoid common mistakes that frustrate mobile visitors, such as featuring unplayable videos (e.g., Flash video as the page’s significant content),” Google tells webmasters. “Mobile pages that provide a poor searcher experience can be demoted in rankings or displayed with a warning in mobile search results.”
Google has of course been warning against this for years.
All the way back in 2013, the company said this in a Webmaster Central blog post: “Many websites embed videos in a way that works well on desktops but is unplayable on smartphone devices. For example, if content requires Adobe Flash, it won’t be playable on an iPhone or on Android versions 4.1 and higher.”
“Instead of using a proprietary video player or putting content in unsupported formats, we recommend using HTML5 standard tags to include videos or animations,” Google says. “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 posted a pair of blog posts about its new mobile-friendly update which has the webmaster world and businesses around the web on their toes. As you probably know, “Mobilegeddon,” or the new ranking signal began to roll out today. Google has said that it might take weeks for it to be completely rolled out.
In the meantime, Google is trying to make it as clear as possible what exactly is happening. The first of the aforementioned blog posts is a fairly brief reminder of the update, and the second is a more lengthy FAQ.
As the company notes in the former, the update is designed to let searchers more easily find “high quality and relevant results,” which have text that is easy to read without tapping or zooming, have tap targets that are spaced appropriately, and avoid unplayable content and horizontal scrolling. Google wants to reward sites on mobile devices that are friendly to users of those devices. Makes sense.
The update only affects rankings on mobile devices, and affects search results on a global basis. It applies to individual pages rather than entire websites, which is important to remember.
Google also wants you to remember that while it does consider this an important change, it sill uses a variety (over 200 in fact) of signals to rank search results. Intent of a search query is still a “very strong” signal it says, so even if a page isn’t mobile-friendly, but has high quality content, it could still rank highly.
Once again, Google says to check pages with its Mobile-Friendly Test or check the status of your entire site through the Mobile Usability report in Webmaster Tools.
“If your site’s pages aren’t mobile-friendly, there may be a significant decrease in mobile traffic from Google Search. But have no fear, once your site becomes mobile-friendly, we will automatically re-process (i.e., crawl and index) your pages,” it says. “You can also expedite the process by using Fetch as Google with Submit to Index, and then your pages can be treated as mobile-friendly in ranking.”
– The update does not affect searches on tablets or desktops, and it’s a page-level change. Only mobile-friendly pages will be able to get a boost as a direct result of the change.
– Google determines whether or not a page is mobile-friendly every time it’s crawled, so webmasters won’t have to wait for another update after they fix a page for it to get the advantage of the signal. This also means that if you weren’t quite ready for the update today, it shouldn’t be that big a deal as long as you can still fix what need’s fixing.
– Google is saying now that the roll-out should take “a week or so”. You can’t determine whether or not you’ve been impacted on April 22.
– If your pages are designed to work well on mobile devices, but aren’t passing Google’s mobile-friendly test, it’s probably because you’re blocking Googlebot for smartphones from crawling resources like JavaScript and CSS. This is the most common reason that happens.
– You can still link to sites that Google doesn’t consider mobile-friendly without fear of repercussions.
“It’s not the best experience for mobile visitors to go from a mobile-friendly page to a desktop-only page, but hopefully as more sites become mobile-friendly, this will become less of a problem,” says Google’s Maile Ohye.
– Mobile-friendliness is assessed the same regardless of whether a site is using responsive design, separate mobile URLs, or dynamic serving.
– It’s naive to think you don’t need to worry about the signal because you think your audience is desktop-only. More and more people are using mobile devices more as time goes on. Even if they’re mostly desktop-only now, that doesn’t mean it will stay that way.
– Pages with the old style of object YouTube embeds may register as not mobile-friendly. Make sure pages are using the newer iframe embeds.
– For tap target size, Google suggests a minimum of 7mm width/height for primary targets and a minimum margin of 5mm between secondary ones.
For more on how you can make your site mobile-friendly for how businesses have been preparing, read this.
About two months ago, Google announced two mobile-related algorithm changes. While it was somewhat surprising that Google announced them so clearly, the actual changes were not all that surprising. The first one was based on app indexing, which Google has been getting off the ground for the past year or so. It was already in effect the time of the announcement. The second was the use of a site’s mobile-friendliness as a ranking signal. Google had also been hinting at this for quite some time before the announcement, but this made it official.
At the time, Google said the mobile-friendly signal would take effect beginning on April 21. The time is now at hand.
Have you made changes to your site to prepare for the algorithm change? Did your site require any change in the first place? Let us know in the comments.
This is not an update that should be taken lightly. It’s one that is bound to affect a pretty large number of websites. Some are referring to it as “Mobilegeddon”. That’s probably going a little far, but it is something that businesses must take into account if they rely on search engines for traffic at all.
Search Engine Journal reminds us that the update will have a greater impact than either Panda or Penguin. Matt Southern recalls:
This was confirmed at SMX Munich this year when Zineb Ait Bahajji of Google’s Webmaster Trends team stated that the mobile friendly algorithm will have a greater impact than Panda or Penguin.
There was no estimate given as to what percentage of search queries might be impacted in total, but it wouldn’t be unreasonable to predict, given this information, that over 12% of mobile search queries will be impacted.
Keeping with the “Mobilegeddon” theme, Business Insider’s Jillian D’Onfro says the change “could crush millions of small businesses,” illustrating this point with a photo of Larry Page standing in front of a mushroom cloud. The article makes the case that small businesses will be hurt most by this because they’re the ones most likely not to know about it.
Despite the sensational, apocalyptic imagery, it does make a good point. As one recent survey illustrates, many small businesses simply don’t have the time to get their online marketing efforts right. You have to assume this includes keeping up with the latest SEO trends and Google updates.
As BI points out, however, there are plenty of larger businesses who may be taking a hit soon as well. It points to research from Somo, finding a bunch that seem ill-prepared. Among them: Nintendo, Windows Phone, American Apparel, Versace, and Channel 4, to name a few.
We recently looked at a survey from gShift, which found that over half of digital marketers across the retail, travel, and automotive industries, believe their business will be affected by the update. 20% said it won’t impact their business, and 28% 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.
How Do I Get My Site Mobile-Friendly?
Make friends with Google’s mobile-friendly test. Use it to enter URLs, and hit “analyze,”. It will tell you if your page is mobile-friendly, and if it’s not, it will give you reasons why.
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.
You’ll also want to make friends with Google’s Mobile SEO guide. Much of the following information comes from there.
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”.
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.
The Mobile SEO guide 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 also has this hour-long Q&A session on the topic available:
While the update won’t impact AdWords ads yet, there have been some “mobile-friendly” labels spotted on ads, so that might be coming in the future.
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.
It’s also worth noting that Google has expanded on its other mobile-related ranking signal. It announced last week that it will now show Android users apps in search results even when the user hasn’t already installed them.
“You’ve invested time and effort into making your app an awesome experience, and we want to help people find the great content you’ve created,” said product manager Lawrence Chang in a blog post. “App Indexing has already been helping people engage with your Android app after they’ve installed it — we now have 30 billion links within apps indexed. Starting this week, people searching on Google can also discover your app if they haven’t installed it yet. If you’ve implemented App Indexing, when indexed content from your app is relevant to a search done on Google on Android devices, people may start to see app install buttons for your app in search results. Tapping these buttons will take them to the Google Play store where they can install your app, then continue straight on to the right content within it.”
“With the addition of these install links, we are starting to use App Indexing as a ranking signal for all users on Android, regardless of whether they have your app installed or not,” he added. “We hope that Search will now help you acquire new users, as well as re-engage your existing ones.”
Interestingly enough, this news came just after the EU announced an investigation into Android.
Google announced on Thursday that it has indexed 30 billion links within apps, and that it will now show Android users apps in search results even if the user hasn’t already installed them. This is the latest move by the search engine to further integrate the app ecosystem into search and improve mobile results.
Are you taking advantage of Google’s app indexing? If so, have you noticed a boost in your rankings? Let us know in the comments.
“You’ve invested time and effort into making your app an awesome experience, and we want to help people find the great content you’ve created,” said product manager Lawrence Chang in a blog post. “App Indexing has already been helping people engage with your Android app after they’ve installed it — we now have 30 billion links within apps indexed. Starting this week, people searching on Google can also discover your app if they haven’t installed it yet. If you’ve implemented App Indexing, when indexed content from your app is relevant to a search done on Google on Android devices, people may start to see app install buttons for your app in search results. Tapping these buttons will take them to the Google Play store where they can install your app, then continue straight on to the right content within it.”
“With the addition of these install links, we are starting to use App Indexing as a ranking signal for all users on Android, regardless of whether they have your app installed or not,” he adds. “We hope that Search will now help you acquire new users, as well as re-engage your existing ones.”
Google announced in February that it had already begun using app indexing as a ranking signal for signed in users who had the apps installed on their devices. They must have liked the results since they’re expanding it into include apps that the user doesn’t have installed.
This comes at an interesting time as the European Commission just announced that it has opened an investigation into Google’s Android business. Complainants will no doubt point to this as a sign that Google is using its dominant search position to get people to focus more on Android as a development platform. Increased search visibility certainly seems like a pretty major plus.
The Commission said the investigation would “focus on whether Google has breached EU antitrust rules by hindering the development and market access of rival mobile operating systems, applications and services to the detriment of consumers and developers of innovative services and products.”
“Smartphones, tablets and similar devices play an increasing role in many people’s daily lives and I want to make sure the markets in this area can flourish without anticompetitive constraints imposed by any company,” said EU Commissioner in charge of competition policy Margrethe Vestager.
Google first began testing app indexing in the fall of 2013. Googlebot began indexing content in Android apps, and gave webmasters the ability to let Google know which app they’d like Google to index through their existing sitemaps file and through Webmaster tools.
At the time, app indexing had no effect on ranking. At first, Google only indexed a select few apps, including Allthecooks, AllTrails, Beautylish, Etsy, Expedia, Flixster, Healthtap, IMDB, Moviefone, Newegg, OpenTable, and Trulia. Last April, Google announced that it had enabled it for over 24 more applications, including: 500px, AOL, BigOven, Bleacher Report, Booking.com, Eventbrite, Glassdoor, Goodreads, Huffington Post, Merriam-Webster, Pinterest, Realtor.com, Seeking Alpha, TalkAndroid, TheFreeDictionary, The Journal, TripAdvisor, Tumblr, Urbanspoon, Wattpad, YP, Zagat, Zappos and Zillow.
They also made it available globally in English. The following month, they made it available in more languages. At Google I/O last year, they announced a slew of additional apps, and opened app indexing up to all Android developers. If you have an Android app, you can participate.
Also at Google I/O, the company held a session called “The Future of Apps and Search,” which discussed bringing search and apps together to give users a better experience. In light of the ranking news, you might want to give that a watch:
Google tells those who wish to get started with app indexing to go here or to learn about other ways developers can integrate with search here.
To get started, visit g.co/AppIndexing and to learn more about the other ways you can integrate with Google Search, visit g.co/DeveloperSearch.”
In other mobile ranking signal news, Google is going to start using mobile-friendliness as a factor on April 21.
Do you expect to get more traffic from Google as a result of new mobile-related ranking signals? Discuss.
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.
Google’s transparency is being called into question again in light of mixed messages it’s been sending webmasters about its two most famous algorithm updates – Panda and Penguin – both of which can have a devastating impact on businesses unfortunate enough to be hit by them.
Google tends to portray itself in a transparent light, but in recent years, it has made moves related to its search algorithm that are actually less transparent than in the past. It’s their product, and they reserve the right to rank sites how they see fit, and nobody is saying they have to divulge that secret recipe (okay, some people are probably saying that), but they’ve gone back and forth on some things that are only frustrating to those trying to keep up with how Google works in the rapidly changing search environment. It is, after all, how many people discover content they’re looking for, and businesses are trying to survive by getting that content to people. It’s only logical that they try to cater to Google’s algorithms.
The latest subject at hand was brought to light by Search Engine Land founding editor Danny Sullivan, who documents Google’s “flip-flopping” on messaging about Panda and Penguin.
“Google has suggested that having to wait months between Panda and Penguin updates would be a thing of the past, since these were supposed to be happening on an ongoing basis now,” he writes. “But the company flip-flopped about this last week. Both still work on a periodic basis, with months elapsing between updates.”
This matters because businesses and websites impacted by these updates have to wait until Google runs them again before they can hope to get their search rankings back after making changes to try to get back in Google’s good graces.
In December, Google said this about Penguin: “That last big update is still rolling out — though really there won’t be a particularly distinct end-point to the activity, since Penguin is shifting to more continuous updates. The idea is to keep optimizing as we go now.”
Search Engine Land reported that Google also “gave a similar statement about Panda, that it was constantly being updated” in March. Sullivan moderated the panel where it said that, and said, “There was no confusion in my mind that Google was saying Panda was operating in real-time mode.”
He tried to clarify with Google, which gave him a statement: “Most of our ranking algorithms, including Panda, have many moving parts. In the case of Panda, some parts are running real-time, so results may be affected at any time. However, the underlying data for Panda hasn’t been refreshed for some time. We are constantly working on improving our algorithms and we expect to refresh the data in the coming months.”
He tried to clarify more, but Google wouldn’t say anything else.
We learned last week that Google hasn’t updated Panda for about six months, as Search Engine Roundtable – a site that really shouldn’t have been hit by Panda – was apparently hit by the update, and has been unable to recover as a result of the lack of update.
Google confirmed in a Webmaster Hangout that neither Panda nor Penguin are updating regularly. Actually, Google’s John Mueller said “I think” they’re not. As Sullivan notes, this just adds to the “uncertainty,” which is hardly in the interest of transparency.
Google would likely argue that it’s being transparent by actually having webmaster hangouts and answering questions, and in some ways it is, but when it gives such vague answers about such important things it’s hardly transparent. What’s the point of doing the hangout if the guy conducting it doesn’t know for sure what’s going on. Matt Cutts is of course on leave.
Sullivan calls, just as many others have, for Google to just let webmastes know in Webmaster Tools when they’ve been hit by Panda or Penguin like they do when they’re hit by manual penalties, but Google doesn’t seem to want to go for that. I guess that would be too transparent.
SEO Book’s Aaron Wall has been laying into the company on Twitter:
Google gives conflicting messages & untruths at SEO confereces. http://t.co/M7ZsXHL7Tf Will those conferences blackball Google reps?
Update: Schwartz is calling attention to a Google+ thread, which features an exchange between Rae Hoffman and Mueller, which Muller admits that the way Google has handled things “sucks”.
Google does regularly update its “Transparency Report,” which looks at government requests for user information, but these updates are of little comfort to the small business who lost its means of getting in front of consumers on the Internet as the result of an algorithm update. Often the sites impacted by updates deserve it, but what about that ones that don’t?
It’s not just about Panda and Penguin though. Those are the big ones, but Google makes changes to its algorithm every single day. Websites are vulnerable to this, and have little information to go on when Google suddenly drops their rankings. For a while there, Google was providing monthly lists of changes it made.
Google described the lists as an attempt to “push the envelope when it comes to transparency.” Google started off delivering the lists one a month as promised. Eventually, they started coming out much more slowly. For a while, they came out every other month, with multiple lists at a time. Then, they just stopped coming.
Google dismissed this as people being bored by them, though that did not appear to be the case judging from the reactions of people after that comment. Anyway, I thought it was about transparency rather than excitement.
Maybe people are bored with Panda and Penguin updates too. Either way, Google sending mixed messages to webmaters is nothing new.
With even Google admitting that the way it has handled things sucks, do you agree? Discuss.
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.
What happened to the Google Panda update? It seems to have gone missing for about six months after Google last officially confirmed a refresh in September. Those keeping track indicate that it hasn’t been updated or refreshed at all since October (the company had said it would be a slow rollout in the first place).
“Based on user (and webmaster!) feedback, we’ve been able to discover a few more signals to help Panda identify low-quality content more precisely,” Google’s Pierre Far said announcing the September update. “This results in a greater diversity of high-quality small- and medium-sized sites ranking higher, which is nice.”
Google has now kind of (vaguely) confirmed that there hasn’t been another update since October. Barry Schwartz at Search Engine Roundtable asked Google’s John Mueller about this in a Webmaster Central hangout, and was told, “that’s possible ,yea.”
Google transparency at its finest.
Schwartz also points to another comment Mueller made during the hangout: “I think both of those algorithms [Panda and Penguin] currently are not updating the data regularly. So that is something for both of them, where we kind of have to push the updates as well.”
Unfortunately, when Google takes so long to update an algorithm, sites can suffer from lost traffic if they were hit by it. If they make the necessary changes that counter what got them hit in the first place, they can potentially regain search visibility. Google has waited a very long time between Penguin updates in the past, which cost a lot of sites dearly. It has historically been more forgiving with Panda, updating it more regularly. Apparently that’s no longer the case.
“5.5 months for a Panda refresh is way too long,” writes Schwartz. “Penguin, well we are use to that torture.”
These sentiments are no doubt echoed by plenty of other webmasters.
Further illustrating the problem is that Schwartz’s own site, Search Engine Roundtable, was apparently hit by Panda in September, and has yet to recover. Luckily for him, he already has a substantial following that will visit the site without needing Google to drive it there. That’s not necessarily the case for a lot of Panda victims.
Search Engine Roundtable is hardly the type of site you’d expect Google’s Panda update to hurt. The guy is one of the most well-known voices in the SEO industry, and frequently puts out unique content that people are interested in reading.
Schwartz did say back when his site was hit that he had sources telling him he wasn’t actually hit by Panda, but based on his other blog posts, he appears to believe that it was Panda. And let’s be honest. How many people do you know of are keeping a closer track on Google’s Panda algorithm than him?
So if Panda is hurting sites that don’t deserve to be hurt by it, maybe Google shouldn’t wait so long to update it.
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.
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.
In case you haven’t noticed, Google has changed a lot over the years, and much of the search engine’s focus is on showing users answers and information about what they’re looking for directly on search results pages through things like direct answers and Knowledge Graph.
On top of that, Google thinks it can effectively dig into websites and distinguish what is fact from what is not, and use that as a ranking signal. This was explained in a recently released research paper about what Google calls “Knowledge-Based Trust,” though the company maintains it is not using it at this time.
Google owns a ton of patents, and there are clues sprinkled throughout that trove about its methods for implementing this stuff. With that in mind, we reached out to THE person who spends more time analyzing Google patents than anybody else on the web, to get some perspective on how Google is doing with these initiatives.
If you follow the SEO industry, Bill Slawski needs no introduction, but just in case, he is the president and founder of SEO by the Sea as well as the Director of Search at Go Fish Digital. His blog has been going strong for the past decade, and is without a doubt the best place to read analysis of Google’s search-related patents.
Let’s get to the Q&A.
In your opinion, how is Google doing with “knowledge” right now? Are they getting it right? Are there too many errors? How do you feel, overall, about how Google has progressed here since first implementing Knowledge Graph?
Bill Slawski: Google is trying a multitude of approaches in responding to Knowledge Graph answers. One of the biggest areas of change happening at Google and at Bing right now is the evolution of search results. With Google, we are seeing increasing numbers of Direct answers, Structured snippets, and rich snippets in response to queries. The Answer Box has been around at Google for a few years, and when it first started out, it tended to be filled with vertical search results that it thought might be appropriate in response to a query – responses filled with News results, Local results, Book results. and others that were different from the 10 blue links that Google had been showing searchers. In Google’s Financial 10 K statement for 2014 they stated that they would be trying to provide more direct answers for natural language queries:
It’s been that way from the beginning; providing ways to access knowledge and information has been core to Google and our products have come a long way in the last decade. We used to show just ten blue links in our results. You had to click through to different websites to get your answers, which took time. Now we are increasingly able to provide direct answers — even if you’re speaking your question using Voice Search — which makes it quicker, easier and more natural to find what you’re looking for.
Google did have a program that was run by Andrew Houge, now the director of Engineering at FourSquare, which he referred to in an online copy of his Resume, the “Annotation Framework” which resulted in a number of knowledge Web based patents being developed at Google, including Google Maps, which seems like a proof of concept for the creation of a knowledge-based index. He then was involved in the Acquisition of Meta-Web , which ended up bringing a number of new search engineers to Google focused upon Semantic Web Technology.
Google has had other people involved in bringing knowledge graph technology to the search engine, including their Head of structured search Alon Halevy, who was involved in The WebTables project that is being used for query refinements in response to different queries and Google’s Structured Snippet, which enrich snippets with content from tables found on pages that are being indexed. Also Google’s Ramanathan Guha, inventor of Google Custom Search Engines, and Google Rich Snippets (his name is on the Google Blog post that introduced rich snippets to searchers.)
It’s clear from that financial statement that the audience Google is responding to with queries are searchers and not site owners.
How about direct answers? Are they doing an adequate job or is there a great deal of room for improvement? Any particular niches you think Google is doing a better job at than others?
BS: Google has been increasing the number of direct answers they show searchers, and recently overhauled the medical answers they were showing searchers, improving those with input from people at the Mayo Clinic and with Google Medical Staff. A White paper that Google released on “How-to” type direct answers described how Google was using a Semantic Sense framework to try to understand the sources of such content better. See: Cooking with Semantics.
What do you make of the recently released research paper about “knowledge-based trust” as a ranking signal? Google has said it’s not using this in search right now, but do you expect them to? Do you believe they should, and that it should carry more weight than links/PageRank?
BS: The team that released this Knowledge-based Trust paper seemed very familiar – Many of them were among the people releasing a paper on Google’s Knowledge Vault, which identified a number of ways that Google could potentially improve the quality of information in Google’s knowledge Base. If you were following along at the time that paper was released, it described a number of approaches that the knowledge graph could be improved, and people were talking about the knowledge Vault being a replacement for Google’s Knowledge Panel at the time. They did describe a number or ways of improving the quality of information in the Knowledge Panel. As I look at more and more patents and papers about Google Knowledge, it does appear that “authoritiative source” information for things like direct answers are located based upon things involving Google’s link graph, like the rankings of pages in response to certain queries, or how often those pages get clicked upon when they are displayed as a search result for a query that might be relevant to the topic of a direct answer. If that is how Google is selecting “authoritative” sources for answers, than using a Knowledge-based Trust approach doesn’t sound like a bad way to go.
Roughly how many patents by your estimate does Google own that you can see directly applying to Knowledge Graph and related features? How many do you see specifically related to Knowledge-based trust?
BS: Questions like this one are why the idea of a Web where better use of Data on the Web might be helpful. Patents at the USPTO (US Patent and Trademark Office) are classified into different categories, but there’s no easy way to sort those patents into those different categories. It would be nice if it were easier to use that classification data to answer a question like this one. Instead I’m left to try to guess. I’ve been searching for patents related to the Knowledge graph. There are a number that have been published at WIPO (The World Intellectual Property Office). I’ve written about a number of Patents published (released as patent applications or granted patents) by Google that directly apply to the knowledge graph, and there are some that I haven’t written about because i had wondered how helpful it might be to write about them. The annotation Framework patents I mentioned earlier, there may have been around 30 or so, and there may have been at least as many others. I haven’t seen any patents that I can say are specifically related to “Knowledge-Based-Trust, though it’s possible that some may have been filed, and not yet made public by the USPTO or WIPO.
It seems like Google does a pretty good job (for the most part) of determining factual information for its own direct answers. It also seems like Google could apply some of this to KBT. Do you see KBT and the work Google has done with direct answers as related at all?
BS: It does seem like the Knowledge-based-Trust approach could lead to better direct answers.
In general, how much of what Google patents ends up being put to use in your estimation?
BS: There’s so much range to what Intellectual property that Google attempts to protect with patents, that I think it’s impossible to make that estimation. I don’t usually spend too much time on patents from them that have little to nothing to do with search (unless they cover something like a cure for cancer).
Is Google’s work with direct answers a serious detriment to webmasters or is this blown out of proportion?
BS: Google’s work with direct answers appears to be a natural evolution of what searchers appear to want in search results – and make it more likely that searchers will continue to use a search engine to perform searches on Mobile devices and using spoken queries.
What are some search-related Google patents you’ve analyzed that you don’t see Google utilizing, but that you think it should?
BS: It’s difficult to answer this because it’s sometimes hard to determine whether or not Google implemented some patents. Google announced recently that they would be taking action against doorway pages on site. I wrote a post about a Google patent granted in 2007 that was originally filed in 2003, that seemed like it addressed many issues related to doorway pages, and yet they are announcing they are going to come out with a new algorithm to address that problem?
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Indeed they are. You can read more about that here.
Slawski recently wrote a series of posts about Google’s Direct Answers, which if you should also take a look at. Those start here.
Google has been making a lot of moves to get mobile users a better user experience. As you may know, the company recently announced a pair of ranking signals for this purpose. One that’s already in effect will return in-app results for signed-in users who have those apps installed on their devices. The other one, which is coming next month, places emphasis on sites that are mobile-friendly in general.
Google is now stressing the importance of helping mobile users fill out online forms on your website, and while this may not be directly related to search, it can certainly help in the conversions department, which is probably the reason you’re wanting to rank highly in the first place.
Back in 2012, Google launched support for the “autocomplete” attribute in Chrome, aimed at making it easier for people to fill out forms on websites. Chrome now supports it for form fields according to the current WHATWG HTML Standard so webmasters and developers can label input element fields with things like “name,” “street address,” etc., without changing the user interface or backend.
According to the company, many webmasters have increased the rate of form completion on their sties by marking up their forms for auto-completion.
Here’s an example of the markup for an email address field.
“A lot of websites rely on forms for important goals completion, such as completing a transaction on a shopping site or registering on a news site,” Google says in a blog post. “For many users, online forms mean repeatedly typing common information like their names, emails, phone numbers or addresses, on different sites across the web. In addition to being tedious, this task is also error-prone, which can lead many users to abandon the flow entirely. In a world where users browse the internet using their mobile devices more than their laptops or desktops, having forms that are easy and quick to fill out is crucial!”
Google put out a video about the “autocompletetype” attribute a couple years ago. In that, Matt Cutts explained how the auto-completing of forms can help you get users to “whisk right through your form” and do what you want them to do.
“Making websites friendly and easy to browse for users on mobile devices is very important,” Google says in the blog post. “We hope to see many forms marked up with the ‘autocomplete’ attribute in the future.”
Here’s a look at Google’s recommended input name and autocomplete attribute values:
“This is important,” said Google’s Gary Illyes in a Google+ post. “Not because it will give you higher rankings, but because filling out forms on mobile is a nightmare without autocomplete.”
He also said he’s not hinting at this being in the search ranking algorithm for mobile.
For more on getting your site mobile-friendly, read this.
Doorway pages have historically been known as pages created specifically to get in search results for various queries, and then send users to a different page. Here’s Google’s instant answer for what they are:
This practice has long been against Google’s quality guidelines, but that’s hardly stopped people from trying it. In 2005, Google’s Matt Cutts advised people not to hire an “assclown SEO that makes doorway pages with sneaky redirects,” and that advice still holds up today, apparently more than ever.
Five years ago, Google started sending webmasters messages when Webmaster Tools detected doorway pages on their sites.
“We have a long-standing view that doorway pages that [are] created solely for search engines can harm the quality of the user’s search experience,” says Brian White from Google’s Webspam team. “For example, searchers might get a list of results that all go to the same site. So if a user clicks on one result, doesn’t like it, and then tries the next result in the search results page and is taken to that same site that they didn’t like, that’s a really frustrating experience.”
Google has “freshened” its definition of doorway pages in the Quality Guidelines. It’s not exactly the same as the definition from the Wikipedia-based instant answer, so this is the one you’ll really want to pay attention to:
Doorways are sites or pages created to rank highly for specific search queries. They are bad for users because they can lead to multiple similar pages in user search results, where each result ends up taking the user to essentially the same destination. They can also lead users to intermediate pages that are not as useful as the final destination.
Here are some examples of doorways:
Having multiple domain names or pages targeted at specific regions or cities that funnel users to one page
Pages generated to funnel visitors into the actual usable or relevant portion of your site(s)
Substantially similar pages that are closer to search results than a clearly defined, browseable hierarchy
Remember when Google launched the Panda update, and gave webmasters a list of questions they could ask themselves to determine if a page is high quality? Well, they’ve provided a list of questions to determine if your pages may be seen as doorway pages now. Luckily this list isn’t as long:
Is the purpose to optimize for search engines and funnel visitors into the actual usable or relevant portion of your site, or are they an integral part of your site’s user experience?
Are the pages intended to rank on generic terms yet the content presented on the page is very specific?
Do the pages duplicate useful aggregations of items (locations, products, etc.) that already exist on the site for the purpose of capturing more search traffic?
Are these pages made solely for drawing affiliate traffic and sending users along without creating unique value in content or functionality?
Do these pages exist as an “island?” Are they difficult or impossible to navigate to from other parts of your site? Are links to such pages from other pages within the site or network of sites created just for search engines?
I think this is mostly common sense stuff for those familiar with Google’s guidance throughout the years, but it never hurts to have clear, concise language to refer to. Some must have been having success with this type of content anyway to have Google implement a new ranking adjustment.
“Over time, we’ve seen sites try to maximize their ‘search footprint’ without adding clear, unique value,” says White. “These doorway campaigns manifest themselves as pages on a site, as a number of domains, or a combination thereof.”
According to White, sites with “large and well-established doorway campaigns” may notice a significant impact from the adjustment.
It’s nice to see Google announcing algorithm changes these days. They don’t always do that. There for a while, they were releasing monthly lists of changes, but eventually stopped doing so, claiming people had grown bored with them.
Last month, Google announced that a new mobile ranking signal had gone in to effect, and that another one would take hold in April.
As you’ve probably noticed in the past, Google sometimes includes an “In the News” section in its search results. This points users to a few sources that have newsy information about whatever it is that they searched for.
The feature used to point users to stories indexed in Google News. It still does that, but last fall, Google started showing content from additional sources, including reddit, to go along with the Google News content.
Now, Google showing content directly from the companies that are in the news has become a story.
Should Google show company content under the guise of news? Do you think this will mislead users? Let us know in the comments.
Reuters reported on Wednesday that the feature has been letting company statements in at the top of the news links. The narrative of the report is that biased statements and press releases can appear above unbiased news stories, and mislead users about critical information. A side narrative of the report is that this can also hurt news publisher traffic. It shares this from Google:
“The goal of search is to get users the right answer at any one time as quickly as possible — that may mean returning an article from an established publisher or from a smaller niche publisher or indeed it might be a press release,” the Google spokeswoman said.
She added Google, which did not announce the September change, does not get paid for including press releases on the lists.
Examples of companies who have recently topped the “In the News” section include Gemalto and Apple. The former has been doing damage control after a hacking incident, while the latter is selling smart watches. It’s worth noting that some find one of the more significant angles of the Apple Watch to be that some models cost as much as $17,000, and this is not something that Apple drew attention to in its own announcements.
According to Reuters, the Gemalto statement that appeared in the section downplayed the impact of the hacking. This is the main thing that’s not sitting well with critics. Should a company be able to have that kind of control over the narrative of news stories about themselves?
If you ask me, it’s a fair question, but it’s also probably being a bit blown out of proportion. Maybe I’m giving people too much credit, but I think most users can figure out that if a story is coming directly from a company, it’s probably going to have that bias. And it’s not like Google shows only one story in these news boxes. Maybe the company message shouldn’t always rank above other unbiased reports, but there’s likely enough other content on the page to discern that it’s not the only take on the news. There’s also something to be said for allowing a company (especially when under attack in the media) to have its side of the story heard.
When it comes to announcements, it’s likely that the company’s version of the story is actually the best result in some cases. Like Nate Swanner at Slash Gear notes, “The issue here is context.”
This shouldn’t be a problem if Google can get the context right. Whether or not it can is another argument.
There are some other points to consider here that don’t seem to be getting much mention by those who have weighed into the conversation. For one, Google News itself has included press releases for a long time. I’m not sure if this has always been the case, but it’s been like that for years. It’s not at all uncommon to see results from Business Wire, PR Newswire, and others. That’s fine, and truth be told, sometimes I prefer these results.
The main difference is apparently that now Google may show releases directly from the corporate websites (like Apple.com, for example) in the “In the News” section. It’s really not a huge leap from what has long been possible. A release from one of the aforementioned distribution services could have appeared there anyway. I just don’t see this as a major concern.
Google does say in a Google News help article, “For sites containing press releases, please keep in mind that we’re unable to include sites that primarily promote their own product or organization.”
Again, that’s Google News, and the “In the News” section includes additional content, so this doesn’t appear to apply to that. Also, press release distribution services clearly fall into a different category as they promote everybody’s content, not just a single company’s.
Google’s web search algorithm has hurt press release sites in the past. That’s not really here nor there, but it is an interesting aside. It was actually less than a year ago that we were talking about press releases sites taking a hit after Panda 4.0. News results are a different beast though.
Another element that should be a part of this conversation is that Google and Twitter recently struck a deal, which will likely see Google including more real-time tweet activity in search results. It remains to be see how Google is going to implement that this time around, but it’s going to give Google better access to fresh content, which could downplay the significance of the “In the News” box. It’s also possible that it could contribute directly to what actually appears in that box. We don’t know.
As far as the “In the News” section, AdWeek’s PRNewser says, “The change is good news for PR and bad news for major journalistic institutions like the Times and The Wall Street Journal, because whoever posts the announcement first will get top placement and clicks. It’s a symptom of our digital age, though: new distribution channels allow brands — and, by extension, their PR teams — to become publishers with greater power to drive the narrative.”
Some think businesses will be able to game their way into the “In the News” results.
What do you think about the whole thing. Is there cause for concern here? Share your thoughts.
A recently released Google research paper has been drawing some attention throughout the search industry. It proposes a signal for ranking search results based upon “the correctness of factual information provides by the source,” rather than links.
As we reported before, just having this paper out does not mean that Google has implemented such a ranking strategy, nor does it necessarily mean that it will. Still, some misleading reports have circulated implying that Google is going forward with it.
Just to confirm that this is not currently part of the Google algorithm, Google webmaster trends analyst John Mueller said as much in a Google+ hangout (via Search Engine Roundtable).
A little over 49 minutes in, Mueller responds to a question about facts potentially being included as a ranking factor, and how Google would handle inaccurate information that can’t be fact checked. Mueller didn’t really have an answer for how Google would deal with that, but did say this:
This was just a research paper that some of our researchers did and not something that we are using in our rankings. We have researchers that do fantastic research that publish tons of papers all the time, and just because they are researching something and trying to see which options are happening there, or because maybe they are patenting something or creating new algorithms, it doesn’t mean that is something we are using in search. At the moment, this is a research paper. I think it’s interesting seeing the feedback around that paper and the feedback from the online community, from the people who are creating web pages, from the SEOs who are promoting these pages, and also from normal web users who are looking at this. At the moment, this is definitely just a research paper and not something that we’re actually using.
So there you have it. Now, all of that said…
The paper is still more interesting than your run-of-the-mill Google research paper, for a few reasons. For one, we’re talking about a signal that could be looked at as more valuable than links, which have long been the backbone of Google’s ranking strategy. If implemented, it would represent a fundamental change in how Google ranks web pages.
Secondly, the way the paper is written essentially calls out links as an outdated way of ranking content. If this is indeed the case, why would Google want to continue placing so much emphasis on that signal, when it has one that it feels is better representative of authoritative content?
The opening paragraph of the paper pretty much discredits links as a valuable signal. It says:
Quality assessment for web sources is of tremendous importance in web search. It has been traditionally evaluated using exogenous signals such as hyperlinks and browsing history. However, such signals mostly capture how popular a webpage is. For example, the gossip websites listed in [16] mostly have high PageRank scores, but would not generally be considered reliable. Conversely, some less popular websites nevertheless have very accurate information.
Fourteen out of fifteen of those sites it refers to, it says, carry a PageRank among the top 15% of websites due to popularity, but for all of them, the Knowledge-Based Trust (KBT), which is the score for trustworthiness of information, is in the bottom 50% of websites.
“In other words, they are considered less trustworthy than half of the websites,” Google says in the paper.
So again, why would Google want to continue ranking content that isn’t trustworthy just because it has a lot of links? And we’re just talking about popular websites here. That’s not even taking into consideration black hat SEO practices, which Google has to constantly play whack-a-mole with.
Thirdly, Google already uses a lot of “knowledge”-based features. You’re no doubt familiar with Knowledge Graph, and more recently Knowledge Vault. The search engine is constantly trying to deliver information directly in search results. This stuff is clearly of great importance to Google. To me, this just adds to the likelihood that Google will eventually use the signal discussed in the research paper, at least to some extent.
What will really be interesting is whether or not Google will inform webmasters if it does implement such a signal. Will it announce it like it did its recent mobile-related signals? Time will tell.
Either way, it can’t hurt websites to strive to include as accurate of information as possible, and do some fact checking when appropriate. Who knows? Maybe one day it will mean the difference in whether or not your page is on the first page of search results. The best part is that there is no down side to this. Accuracy lends to credibility, which good for you no matter what.
If your’e a small business still trying to navigate this thing we call the web and to figure out how to best get Google to treat your site well, you might want to watch the latest video from the Google Webmasters YouTube channel.
It’s an “open office hours” session for small businesses, in which Google’s Pierre Far and Zineb Ait Bahajji answer questions from small businesses, and provide tips on how to approach your site.
They talk about how you build a site, and determining who your users are, what they want, and whether or not they get it from your site.
The Googlers talk answer submitted questions from people who aren’t actively participating in the hangout as well as live questions from members.
The recording took place on March 10. There’s a transcript available on the video page, but it’s got a lot of errors in it, so you’re going to be better off just watching and/or listening to the video.
Last week, Google announced two new ranking signals related to mobile. One has already been implemented, and takes into account app indexing when showing results to signed-in users who have apps installed on their devices.
The second signal looks at how mobile-friendly webpages are, and follows all of the guidance Google has been giving websites about mobile-friendliness over the past year or so. Interestingly, Google actually announced a date (April 21) in which this signal would go into effect, which is something the company hardly ever does.
The announcement seemed to suggest that webmasters better have their sites ready to rock and roll by that date or risk losing rankings. While it’s definitely still a good idea to get your site mobile-friendly by that date, things may not be quite as pressing as the announcement made it seem.
Search Marketing Expo (SMX) West took place this week, and Barry Schwartz moderated a panel on mobile SEO, which featured Google’s own Gary Illyes. According to Schwartz, Illeys 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. That kind eases the burden on some sites of scrambling to up their mobile-friendliness by the April 21 date. Schwartz writes:
This mobile-friendly algorithm doesn’t seem to be run like Penguin where it is site-wide, impacting the whole entire site. It also doesn’t appear to run in spurts or periodically like Penguin or the page-layout algorithm. So even if you do not have the time and resources to get your whole site mobile-friendly by April 21st, you should be able to do the most important pages first and work your way through the rest as soon as you can.
Also, less importantly, Gary said they are working on a separate mobile-friendly index. He said it as if it wasn’t a big deal, that someone, somewhere at Google is playing around with the idea of using a separate mobile-friendly index for mobile results. Personally, I don’t see it being efficient for Google to run separate indexes. In fact, they consolidated those efforts in the past with the supplemental index a long long time ago. We will see if anything comes of the separate mobile index but I doubt we will hear much of it anytime soon.
So how do you make sure your pages are mobile-friendly? Luckily, Google offers a great deal of guidance.
For one, you should bookmark and make friends with Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test tool, which lets you plug in a URL and see if it’s mobile-friendly, and if it’s not, see what Google doesn’t like about it.
You’ll also want to read up on Google’s mobile SEO Guide. We delved into all of this a bit more in an article here.
If you have an Android app, you’re definitely going to want to implement app indexing if you haven’t yet. More on that here.
Google has a new paper out that discusses how it might rank pages based on facts as opposed to links. If this were to become the case, it would represent a huge move for the search engine, which has historically used links as a major indication of relevance. In fact, it was the PageRank algorithm that really put Google on the map in the first place, and led to the search engine overtaking other players like Yahoo years ago.
Do you think Google’s algorithm would be better off with the approach discussed in the paper? Let us know in the comments.
These days, Google has at least over 200 signals it uses to rank content, but links are still a significant part of that. Just how significant they is debatable, particularly as Google includes more and more content and answers directly in its search results.
Of course just having this paper doesn’t mean that Google has implemented such a ranking strategy, nor does it necessarily mean that it will. The company has countless patents, and not all of them are in use. That said, the fact that Google has been researching this, and has indeed authored a paper on it, combined with the moves the search engine has already made, suggest that this is something Google could implement at some point.
You can read the whole paper here. The abstract reads as follows:
The quality of web sources has been traditionally evaluated using exogenous signals such as the hyperlink structure of the graph. We propose a new approach that relies on endogenous signals, namely, the correctness of factual information provided by the source. A source that has few false facts is considered to be trustworthy.
The facts are automatically extracted from each source by information extraction methods commonly used to construct knowledge bases. We propose a way to distinguish errors made in the extraction process from factual errors in the web source per se, by using joint inference in a novel multi-layer probabilistic model.
We call the trustworthiness score we computed Knowledge-Based Trust (KBT). On synthetic data, we show that our method can reliably compute the true trustworthiness levels of the sources. We then apply it to a database of 2.8B facts extracted from the web, and thereby estimate the trustworthiness of 119M webpages. Manual evaluation of a subset of the results confirms the effectiveness of the method.
So, they’ve confirmed the effectiveness of this method. That’s interesting. And if that wasn’t enough to get you thinking about where Google might be headed, the opening paragraph of the paper’s introduction pretty much discredits links as a valuable signal:
Quality assessment for web sources is of tremendous importance in web search. It has been traditionally evaluated using exogenous signals such as hyperlinks and browsing history. However, such signals mostly capture how popular a webpage is. For example, the gossip websites listed in mostly have high PageRank scores, but would not generally be considered reliable. Conversely, some less popular websites nevertheless have very accurate information.
Curious about which “gossip sites” they’re referring to? Well, the section it points to points readers to this list of the top 15 most popular celebrity gossip sites, which include: Yahoo! OMG!, TMZ, E Online, People, USMagazine, WonderWall, Gawker, ZimBio, PerezHilton, HollywoodLife, RadarOnline, PopSugar, WetPaint, MediaTakeOut, and FishWrapper.
Later in the paper, it notes that among these fifteen sites, fourteen have a PageRank among the top 15% of websites due to popularity, but for all of them, the KBT are in the bottom 50%.
“In other words, they are considered less trustworthy than half of the websites,” it says. It also says that forum websites tend to get low KBT, specifically calling out an example of inaccurate info found on Yahoo Answers, which you’ve probably seen ranking highly in Google results repeatedly.
The paper does also note that KBT as a signal is orthogonal to more traditional signals like PageRank. It also appears to hint at identifying content that is irrelevant to the main topic of a website.
This all really just scratches the surface of what the paper itself gets into, so feel free to jump in there for a deeper dive into what we’re dealing with.
In theory, what Google is proposing here could lead to some major improvements to search rankings. It makes some really good points. Chief among them is the one that popularity isn’t necessarily the best indicator of relevance.
Questions will remain, however, about just how well Google really is able to distinguish fact from fiction and/or fact versus outdated information. We’ve seen Google struggle with this time and time again with its Knowledge Graph. If Google’s “knowledge” is to become the backbone of ranking in the way that PageRank has been historically, it could open the algorithm up to potential errors.
That said, given that Google uses so many signals, and this would still just be one of them, I personally feel like this could be a more legitimate signal than PageRank. It’s been well-documentecd how links can be manipulated while Google plays whack-a-mole both manually and algorithmically. This might be harder for evildoers to game. Facts would certainly be harder to buy, although you have to wonder how the native advertising/sponsored content industry will play into this.
For now, it’s all theoretical anyway. You should really be more concerned with getting your site mobile-friendly. This is an actual signal Google will launch next month. If you have an Android app, you should get it set up for app indexing. These are the things that can make a difference in the near term.
Last week, Google made two announcements about how it will rank search results on mobile devices going forward. The one that has received the greatest amount of attention is the inclusion of a mobile-friendly ranking signal, which will go into effect beginning April 21. This gives sites time to make sure their sites meet Googles criteria for being mobile-friendly, and to avoid a potential rankings hit. More on how to make your site more mobile-friendly here.
The other announcement was that Google is now using information from indexed apps as a ranking factor for signed-in users who have the app installed. That’s already in effect.
Google said that as a result of this particular factor, it may now surface content from indexed apps more prominently in search.
Google first began testing app indexing in the fall of 2013. Googlebot began indexing content in Android apps, and gave webmasters the ability to let Google know which app they’d like Google to index through their existing sitemaps file and through Webmaster tools.
As the company explained at the time:
“Searchers on smartphones experience many speed bumps that can slow them down. For example, any time they need to change context from a web page to an app, or vice versa, users are likely to encounter redirects, pop-up dialogs, and extra swipes and taps. Wouldn’t it be cool if you could give your users the choice of viewing your content either on the website or via your app, both straight from Google’s search results?”
“If both the webpage and the app contents are successfully indexed, Google will then try to show deep links to your app straight in our search results when we think they’re relevant for the user’s query and if the user has the app installed. When users tap on these deep links, your app will launch and take them directly to the content they need.”
Google said back then that app indexing would not impact ranking. Now it does.
At first, Google only indexed a select few apps, including Allthecooks, AllTrails, Beautylish, Etsy, Expedia, Flixster, Healthtap, IMDB, Moviefone, Newegg, OpenTable, and Trulia. Last April, Google announced that it had enabled it for over 24 more applications, including: 500px, AOL, BigOven, Bleacher Report, Booking.com, Eventbrite, Glassdoor, Goodreads, Huffington Post, Merriam-Webster, Pinterest, Realtor.com, Seeking Alpha, TalkAndroid, TheFreeDictionary, The Journal, TripAdvisor, Tumblr, Urbanspoon, Wattpad, YP, Zagat, Zappos and Zillow.
They also made it available globally in English. The following month, they made it available in more languages. At Google I/O last year, they announced a slew of additional apps, and opened app indexing up to all Android developers. If you have an Android app, you can participate. At the time, they also made some design tweaks to how apps appear.
Also at Google I/O, the company held a session called “The Future of Apps and Search,” which discussed bringing search and apps together to give users a better experience. In light of the ranking news, you might want to give that a watch if you don’t already have app indexing implemented.
Here’s a much shorter overview on getting your app in the Google index:
In December, Google said clicks on app deep links jumped by 10x the prior quarter, with 15% of signed-in Google searches on Android now returning deep links. These numbers have likely only increased since then.
There are four basic steps for enabling users who have your app installed to open your content within the app from Google search results: add deep link support, verify your app’s official site on the Google Play Console, provide deep links, and check for errors in Webmaster Tools, so you can fix them.
You can find the documentation for adding deep linking support here. You have to specify intent filters in your app manifest that define how to reach specific content inside your app. Google walks you through this process in that link.
You’ll then want to test your deep links using the Android Debug Bridge, which is a command line tool that lets you communicate with an emulator instance or connected Android-powered device.
You’ll also want to restrict access to parts of your app content. This involves including a noindex.xml file in your app to indicate which deep links shouldn’t be indexed. You’ll be able to specify a list of URIs to exclude, or a list of URI prefixes. As Google notes, it’s similar to how the robots noindex meta tag works for websites.
After you’ve added support, you’ll need to verify your website. Sign in to your Google Play Developer Console, click All Applications, select the app you want to verify, and select Services & APIs from the left menu. Under “App Indexing from Gogole Search,” cliick “Verify website.” Type your web address, and click “Verify”. Then, go to Webmaster Tools (requires “owner” permissions), and click “All Messages” from the left menu. Open the verification request message, approve it, and then your app will appear on the Associates page of your WMT account. You can then provide deep links for each web page that has a corresponding deep link.
After verification, you’ll want to provide deep links for each page that has a corresponding deep link either on each page of your site or in your sitemaps. You can ffind documentation on this here.
When adding deep links to your sitemap or webiste, Google says they should only be included for canonical web URLs, and to remember to specify an app deep link for your homepage. Not all website URLs in a sitemap need to have a corresponding app deep link, don’t include them for those that aren’t supported by your app. News sites using News Sitemaps should include deep link annotations in them as well as in general sitemaps. Google also says not to provide annotations for deep links that execute native ARM code. This enables app indexing to work for all platforms, it says.
“When Google indexes content from your app, your app will need to make HTTP requests that it usually makes under normal operation,” Google’s Michael Xu said in a blog post last April. “These requests will appear to your servers as originating from Googlebot. Therefore, your server’s robots.txt file must be configured properly to allow these requests. Finally, please make sure the back button behavior of your app leads directly back to the search results page.”
Information related to app indexing that Google shows in Webmaster Tools includes: errors in indexed pages within apps, weekly clicks and impressions from app deep links via Google search; and stats on your sitemap (if that’s how you implemented the app deep links). Google says it will be adding a lot more.
There are two new ways to track performance for your app deep links. Google will send a weekly clicks and impressions update to the Message center in in WMT, and you can now track how much traffic app deep links drive to your app using referrer information (referrer extra in the ACTION_VIEW intent). The company said in December it was working to integrate this info with Google Analytics.
“Blocked resources are one of the top reasons for the ‘content mismatch’ errors you see in Webmaster Tools’ Crawl Errors report,” said Google Webmaster Trends analyst Mariya Moeva. “We need access to all the resources necessary to render your app page. This allows us to assess whether your associated web page has the same content as your app page.”
“To help you identify errors when indexing your app, we’ll send you messages for all app errors we detect, and will also display most of them in the ‘Android apps’ tab of the Crawl errors report,” Moeva said.
At the time, Google announced three new error types that go along with the existing “content mismatch” and “intent URI not supported” error alerts: APK not found, no first-click free, and back button violation.
Google has an app indexing “codelab” tutorial available here. This will walk you through running a sample app, opening a starter project, identifying deep links, adding intent filters, adding code to handle intent filters, testing intent filters, verifying the Google Play Service version, creating an API client, recording a page view, recording a page view end, testing Autocomplete in Google Search, adding app indexing markup, connecting the app using Google Play Console, verifying the app in Webmaster Tools, and updating robots.txt.
Apps with or without corresponding webpages can use the App Indexing API to notify Google of their deep links. Documentation for this is available here.
There’s also an app indexing checklist here. Additionally, you may want to peruse the FAQ.
For now, Google only supports Android apps for app indexing. While it’s missing a huge chunk of popular apps by not supporting iOS, Android does dominate smart device operating system market share, mainly due to its wide use across a plethora of devices. According to new research from ABI, Android holds 53% of that market share.
In other words, that’s a lot of potential visibility for app content in Google search results. It’s also possible that Google will eventually support iOS apps.
“You’d have to imagine Google will bring support, despite Apple not probably making it easy, to iOS devices,” wrote Search Engine Roundtable’s Barry Schwartz in December, as he pointed to a hint that Google may do just that.
It’s not a major hint, but a Googler responded to a question in a Webmaster Help forum thread, saying, “app indexing is supported only for Android for now. Stay tuned for updates (:”
Beyond making the content from existing Android apps more visible with its new ranking signal, it’s likely that the move will inspire more companies to create Android apps in the first place.
Last week, Google announced the launch of paid search results in Google Play, which will also help app makers gain more exposure. This is only in the pilot stage for now, but will likely become a major feature available to Android users and advertisers.
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.
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”.
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.
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.
Google announced that it will be expanding its use of “mobile-friendliness” as a ranking signal beginning on April 21. That gives you a little less than two months to make sure your site fits the bill. The change will go into effect across all languages, and Google says it will have a “significant impact” in its search results.
You know if Google is saying the impact is going to be “significant,” it’s probably not something to take lightly. As a result of the change, Google says users will find it easier to get relevant, high quality search results optimized for their devices.
“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,” says Google in a blog post. “As more people use mobile devices to access the internet, our algorithms have to adapt to these usage patterns. In the past, we’ve made updates to ensure a site is configured properly and viewable on modern devices. We’ve made it easier for users to find mobile-friendly web pages and we’ve introduced App Indexing to surface useful content from apps.”
Now, they’re getting ready to implement the expanded ranking signal and also, starting today, they’re using information from indexed apps as a ranking signal for signed-in users who have said apps installed. Users may start seeing more content from apps they use displayed more prominently in search results.
With regard to mobile-friendliness, Google notes that it has talked about such an algorithm update in the past, but that this is the first time it’s attached a date to it.
Throughout 2014, Google made quite a few moves showing it was focusing on improving the mobile search experience for users. In November, they added a mobile-friendly label to mobile search results for sites that meet the criteria. The company mentioned that it was experimenting with using the same criteria for a ranking signal.
Last month, webmasters were getting warnings from Google when their sites weren’t mobile-friendly, suggesting that that ranking signal might be creeping up. It’s not a surprise that Google is about to implement it, though it is somewhat of a surprise that they gave a launch date. They’re not usually so kind in announcing these things.
When Google announced the labels, it also laid out some criteria for earning them. For one, a site should avoid software that isn’t common on mobile devices. It specifically mentioned Flash, following its previous shaming of Flash sites in mobile search results when it started showing messages in mobile search results for sites that may not work. Messages said things 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. You can 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.
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.
“A mobile-friendly site is one that you can easily read & use on a smartphone, by only having to scroll up or down,” said Google’s John Mueller at the time. “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 said.
If you have a mobile app, don’t forget the app indexing signal. You can find a step-by-step guide on getting it set up here. This might be more motivation for some businesses to build mobile apps. On top of that, Google just announced paid search results in the Google Play store, so Android apps will get some new visibility opportunities there. This is only in the pilot phase for the time being, however.
Are you happy with Google’s latest moves? Discuss.
