In April 2015, Google launched a new mobile-friendly ranking algorithm that greatly impacts how mobile sites are ranked. According to Practical E-Commerce, "the update improves rankings for sites that provide a mobile-friendly experience to searchers on mobile devices, and, by association, demotes sites that do not."
Google looks at websites on a page-by-page basis - meaning each page is analyzed separately - to determine if the entire site - or just part of it - is mobile-friendly.
Google provides a tool that confirms if your site is mobile-friendly:
https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/mobile-friendly/
Why did Google change its mobile-friendly ranking algorithm? Google wants to make sure it is the search engine of choice for searches. To do this, it needs to make sure that searches come across mobile-friendly websites while Googling on their phones.
How much does mobile friendliness affect rankings? Moovweb, a cloud-based business that helps companies build out and optimize their mobile experience, recently performed a study on mobile-friendliness vs. search engine rankings.
Moovweb analyzed 1,000+ e-commerce companies to analyze how mobile-friendliness played into SEO. Per the graph below, Moovweb found that, on average, 80% of the top three Google mobile search results are considered mobile friendly.
As expected, Moovweb also discovered that mobile-friendliness holds a little less weight the further down you go into the rankings.
These charts leave one burning question in my mind - why is Google allowing non-mobile-friendly sites to be ranked in the top three?
Sources:
- http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/83483-SEO-Google-to-Make-Mobile-friendly-a-Ranking-Signal
- http://searchengineland.com/library/google/google-mobile-friendly-update
No comments:
Post a Comment