Google’s New Algorithm Update Favors Mobile-Friendliness

(Photo: iPhone 5S Backside by Viktor Hanacek via picjumbo.com)

Google recently announced that they would be making another update to their search algorithm on April 21, 2015. It’s been continually prioritizing “mobile-friendliness” over the past several months, and this latest update will expand the use of “mobile-friendliness” as a ranking signal (and in turn, increase the amount of mobile-friendly content in search results).

If your site is not currently mobile-friendly, now is the time to act! The best way to ensure that your site is mobile-friendly is to build it in responsive design so it scales appropriately to any device – adjusting layout, content, and functionality accordingly. Google has also created a full guide for creating mobile-friendly sites.

If you do not have a responsive site, but do have a mobile site with its own URL (m.yourwebsite.com), you can still benefit from the expansion of mobile-friendliness, but to ensure that the mobile-friendly credit is fully leveraged for your domain we recommend following Google’s steps for signaling your configuration to search engines. It’s as simple as adding canonical/alternate tags to your mobile and desktop pages so the search engines know where your mobile content exists and how it relates to your desktop site.

To make sure your site is mobile-friendly and prepared for the algorithm updates, check out Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test, a tool to tell you how mobile-friendly your site is and pinpoint specific issues.