As of April 21st, Google will be extending the use of mobile usability as a ranking factor throughout mobile search results. This change, as Google announced, would be affecting mobile searches in all languages worldwide and will have a “significant” impact on the search results. This marks Google’s much awaited step towards delivering mobile-friendly websites in mobile search. If users have been following Google changes closely, the signs had been building up over the past few months.
Google hinted at this new change, when they introduced official set of mobile friendly site criteria, along with a mobile friendly site testing tool to know whether or not a particular website met Google’s criteria.
Google said on their official blog post, ” To get help with making a mobile-friendly site, check out our guide to mobile-friendly sites. If you’re a webmaster, you can get ready for this change by using the following tools to see how Googlebot views your pages:
1.) If you want to test a few pages, you can use the Mobile-Friendly Test.
2. ) If you have a site, you can use your Webmaster Tools account to get a full list of mobile usability issues across your site using the Mobile Usability Report.”
Google also announced that starting today it will begin to use information from indexed apps as a factor in ranking for signed-in users who have the app installed. As a result, users may see content from indexed apps featured more prominently in search results.
