Google Introduced A Mobile-Friendly Update
On Tuesday, April 21, 2015, Google introduced a mobile-friendly update to the world. The purpose of this new algorithm is to increase rank for those pages that provide adequate mobile friendliness for users of mobile devices. In addition, searchers will be able to access relevant, high-quality search results faster and easier when text is legible without taking actions to enlarge it, appropriate spacing is on tap items, and the page stays away from horizontal scrolling and unplayable content.
Google states that this update does not include every type of device and applies to the following:
• Search rankings only on mobile devices
• Search results for all languages worldwide
• Individual pages instead of entire websites
Google will continue to use a variety of characteristics on top of the mobile-friendly one to rank search results. For example, the search query’s objective also has influence on rank, and this means if the page is not mobile friendly, but if it contains quality content, it may still receive a high ranking when it provides pertinent content in response to a search query.
Webmasters should learn if their pages are mobile-friendly through the use of Google’s Webmaster Tools such as the Mobile Usability report that encompasses the entire website, or the Mobile-Friendly Test for individual pages. When pages are not sufficiently mobile-friendly, they will suffer a lack of traffic from search queries in Google. Webmasters should not be overly concerned if this is an issue, though, as Google will re-crawl and re-index the pages once the appropriate changes transform them into mobile-friendly ones. If the webmasters wish to expedite this process, they can use the “Fetch as Google” tool along with the command of “Submit to Index” to have Google re-crawl and re-index their pages. Since so many are using mobile devices today to perform searches, webmasters should ensure that all their pages are mobile friendly to benefit from the Google mobile-friendly update.