From 21st April 2015 your website will not show up in Google’s mobile search results unless it passes their mobile friendly test. Learn how this change to mobile website search rankings might affect you.
Google have announced that from 21st April they are going to roll out an updated algorithm that will detect whether or not your website is mobile friendly. If your site is deemed to be mobile ‘unfriendly’ by the search giant then it will no longer appear in Google’s search results on a mobile phone. So not having a mobile compliant website could prove disastrous for a business for two reasons.
- Your site will no longer be found in mobile organic search results for what you do.
- Your site will no longer be found in mobile organic search results for your business name.
The latter reason is a real killer as most people are lazy and just use Google to find a website rather than typing in the full web address into their phone’s browser.
The impact of the algorithm change may take a number of weeks to take effect as the changes will be phased in across Google’s search territories. Meanwhile a video posted by Google on their Google+ page answers a series of questions on the subject but judging by the comments, people are still very confused. One popular question is whether search results on tablets will also be affected by this or future changes.
Is your website mobile-friendly?
There are two quick and simple ways to find out whether or not your website is mobile-friendly:
- Visit Google on your smart phone, type in your company name, and scroll down until you have found your website in the search results. If at the beginning of the meta description (the bit under your company name and URL) you have the words ‘Mobile-friendly’, then your site is mobile compliant. If you don’t see it, then your website is not mobile-friendly according to Google’s criteria.
- You can also find out by visiting the Google Mobile-Friendly Test and simply typing your page URLs into the field provided. It will then analyse that particular page and give you a straight yes or no answer.
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