Rich's Web Design Newsletter!

Google launches new 'mobile-friendly' website label

There are hundreds of factors that Google considers when it sends its "bots" off to crawl your website. Google bots analyze and interpret Web pages inside and out based on a combination of calculations, also known as an algorithm, to see how relevant and helpful content will be for particular searches. These factors are the subject of much debate, because Google has never released a full list of them. Instead, SEO analysts have been left to speculate about potential changes to this algorithm and hoping to stay a step ahead of the game.

Google has simply taken it a step further with this search results change. Now, mobile design can have an impact on whether anyone even clicks on your site at all.

Google confirmed that it cares about mobile-friendly design - a lot, and not just as a factor in its algorithm - when it announced this week that it will start optimizing search results for mobile users by adding a "mobile-friendly" label to websites on search results pages. This means that websites meeting Google's criteria for a mobile-friendly site will be more likely to turn up in a mobile search.

If your current Web page isn't mobile-friendly, this change absolutely can have an impact on your website traffic from search engines. Based on Google's announcement, here are some of the features that Google bots will look for in a mobile-friendly site:

Readable text that doesn't require zooming.
Pages that automatically resize, to avoid scrolling.
Links that are far enough apart so that it's possible to tap the correct one

Google's Mobile Friendly Tool - If you're unsure whether your website is mobile-friendly, run it through Google 's Mobile-Friendly Test. This test analyzes your Web page and will report back to you if your site passes the test. If your site is NOT mobile-friendly, it may be a smart move for your business to adjust your website!
... Google is watching!

For those RWD clients that KNOW that their site is 'mobile friendly', please use the above tool to see how your site appears to Google!