If you need any proof that mobile is the way of the future, look no further than Google’s mobile-friendly update to search algorithms. With this new release, mobile-friendly sites will be given higher priority and rankings than their non-mobile-friendly counterparts.
According to Google, “…we will be expanding our use of mobile-friendliness as a ranking signal. This change will affect mobile searches in all languages worldwide and will have a significant impact in our search results. Consequently, users will find it easier to get relevant, high quality search results that are optimized for their devices.”
Google will continue to use other factors in ranking search results, so high quality content pages which are not mobile-friendly, could still get a high ranking. Rankings are page-level, and mobile-friendly pages on a site will get higher rankings than non-mobile-friendly pages.
The rollout begins on April 21st, and will take approximately one week for all sites to be indexed by Google. Every time a website is crawled and indexed, Google will determine its mobile-friendliness. Pages can be tested using this mobile-friendly testing tool from Google.
