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Google to Favor ‘Mobile-Friendly’ Sites in Search Results

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Google to Favor ‘Mobile-Friendly’ Sites in Search Results

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Is your website mobile-friendly? If so, great! Kick up your feet, sit back, and wait for your site hopefully appear higher in Google’s search rankings come April 21. Because that’s the day Google will tweak its search ranking parameters to give mobile-friendly sites a boost.

If not, you have a bit of work to do. And you can start by using Google’s mobile-friendly test page(Opens in a new window) to determine whether some of the pages on your site work well on smartphones, tablets, and the lot. If you want to take a look at your entire domain, you’ll want to use Google’s Webmaster Tools(Opens in a new window) to give you a full report—assuming, of course, that you have Google’s services integrated into your site in some capacity. Here’s hoping a massive redesign isn’t in your future.

“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. 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,” reads a blog post(Opens in a new window) from Google.

According to Google, its decision to increase the use of “mobile-friendliness” for its search rankings will impact all mobile searches on the site. It will also have a “significant impact” on Google’s mobile search results, with a preference given to sites designed to allow users to get content that’s been optimized for their devices.

Google is also making another tweak to its search results related to app indexing—or the process by which one can jump immediately from a search result to a related Android application (like, for example, if your search pulls up a recipe from a cooking website, tapping on it would bring up the recipe in the cooking website’s app if you already have it installed).

“Starting today, we will begin to use information from indexed apps as a factor in ranking for signed-in users who have the app installed. As a result, we may now surface content from indexed apps more prominently in search,” Google said.

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Source link : https://www.pcmag.com/news/google-to-favor-mobile-friendly-sites-in-search-results