Everything, and everyone seems to be going mobile! Well, at least what that’s one would think at the SMX show. Google certainly wants everyone to “go mobile,” and has pre-announced a major algorithm shake up, here. Here’s the relevant paragraph (or is it a warning?)
Starting April 21, 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.
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:
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If you want to test a few pages, you can use the Mobile-Friendly Test.
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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.
From the session on “Things You Didn’t Know about Mobile SEO, but Should” –
- First placement on Mobile / organic is huge – much more important than the desktop. (This gets my DUH award). Just take out your mobile phone, do a Google search and see how ads crowd up the first half of the screen, and if you’re lucky, you’ll see just one or two “organic” results. So you thought desktop SEO was hard? Meet Mobile SEO: winner take all.
- Google wants to index your mobile content, which means change your robots.txt file to ALLOW the crawler to crawl your CSS and Javascript. (If this makes no sense, ask your resident programmer nerd).
And from the Session on Mobile Apps –
- Google wants to, and is beginning to, index “within apps.” In fact they have a whole new microsite, explaining how to help Google index your content.
So #1 Go Mobile, and #2 start to think about apps – and, if apps make sense, how to get Google to “dive deep” into your app.
