My new website passes Googles ‘mobile-friendly’ test. Every single website I produce passes the Google mobile-friendly test and scores 100% on the Google mobile user experience test.
What does this mean and how does it affect my website?
Google rolled out an update to mobile search results in May 2016 that “increases the effect” of its mobile-friendly ranking signal. The goal is to “help our users find even more pages that are relevant and mobile-friendly,” though the company didn’t share exactly how much of an impact it expects the change to have.
In November 2014, Google started labelling sites as “mobile-friendly” to show which pages are optimized for mobile phones. In February 2015, Google announced plans to roll out mobile ranking changes on April 21.
A webpage is eligible for the “mobile-friendly” label if it meets the following criteria, as detected in real time by Googlebot:
- Avoids software that is not common on mobile devices, like Flash
- Uses text that is readable without zooming
- Sizes content to the screen so users don’t have to scroll horizontally or zoom
- Places links far enough apart so that the correct one can be easily tapped
Google started using this label as a ranking factor across all languages worldwide in April. The change applied to individual pages, not entire websites.
If your site isn’t mobile-friendly, you’ll start seeing some detrimental effects to your websites Google rankings – if you haven’t already. It’s worth noting that just because your website fit’s on a mobile screen, it may not be deemed as mobile-friendly by Google, and will still suffer in search engine results.