Wednesday, April 22, 2015

Is Your Website Google Mobile Friendly?


Despite the fears of a “Mobilegeddon”, does your dedicated commercial website compliant with Google’s latest “mobile friendly update”?

By: Ringo Bones 

If your “economically-viable” website is not “Google Mobile Friendly”, it could not be earning as much money as it should be. A few days ago, anyone with a dedicated economically viable website had been busy to comply with their “Mobilegeddon checklists” due to social media wide “Mobilegeddon scare” a few days ago in order to avoid their site from retreating from Google’s top-tier search results. But does a mobile-friendly website insure a recipe for success in the face of Google’s recent revamp of its search algorithm to prioritize mobile friendly websites priority for top-tier Google search results? 

A few web savvy nettizens first learned of Google’s plan to release a new search results algorithm designed to reward mobile-friendly web pages back in February 2015. According to these web savvy nettizens, it’s unprecedented for Google to pre-announce a big algorithmic change like this, but Google did so in order to give online publishers ample time to make their sites more “mobile friendly”. 

Google’s brand new search results algorithm was officially launched back in April 21, 2015. Fortunately, according to Google, this update will impact only mobile searches and it will give a search results ranking boost to mobile-friendly pages in Google’s mobile search results only. As it will only impact mobile searches – as in mobile smartphone devices (powered by Google’s Android?) and will have no impact on your desktop computer’s search ranking results. Tablet computer search results are the same as desktop search results. 

Even though experts say that in order for your website to comply to be “mobile friendly”, it must have easily clickable function buttons and must easily resize its fonts and graphics to fit into mobile devices, according to Google, the only “official way” to know if your site is already indexed by Google as “mobile friendly” is to see if your site has the “mobile friendly label” in the mobile search results. Using Google’s official mobile friendly testing tool will show if your site is “mobile friendly”, but Google may still need some time to update their index to pick up on the fact that your web pages are mobile friendly. You can also check with the mobile usability reports within Google Webmaster Tools, but those can be fairly delayed. 

Since 2013, premium online adverts – i.e. ones that make your website earn more money in its operation – had been relegated by Google on mobile device search results. That is, your website earns more money if more people are using Google to search for it on their mobile devices. Recently, it has been announced that Google had been telling the press that they are “experimenting” with a new mobile friendly search ranking algorithm as far back as December 2014.