Be Mobile-Friendly Or Lose Your Position In Google

After several months of testing, Google introduced a new standard for browsing on mobile devices. Websites that are optimized for mobile devices are given ‘mobile-friendly’ label in mobile search results. For now, those labels are visible while browsing Google in any web browser locations. To see how it works, we typed ‘activemobi’ in Google.com and noticed the mobile-friendly label just below the URL.

Mobile-friendly test

If you want to check if your page is mobile-friendly, use the Mobile-Friendly Test recommended by Google. After just a few seconds you will see one of two possible notifications :

Mobile friendliness criteria

Google tests the friendliness of your page to mobile devices with these criteria:

• placing links far enough so that tapping the right one isn’t difficult
• avoiding software that is not compatible with mobile devices, such as Flash
• using text that is readable without zooming in the page
• sizing content to mobile devices screens so that the user doesn’t have to zoom in your site or scroll it horizontally

What is interesting, if a website is not mobile-friendly, Google will indicate all the mistakes that you can correct.

Be mobile or lose customers

In June 2013, Google started penalizing the websites that cause bad mobile user experience. Introducing mobile-friendly labels is another step into making mobile browsing easier and more comfortable – users themselves decide which pages they want to enter and which they want to stay away from. It’s not all – it may turn out that soon mobile-friendly sites will rank higher in mobile Google searches. The Mountain View corporation is now experimenting with mobile-friendly SERP, but has not released any comments yet. We may be sure about one thing – Google starts not only noticing mobile users, but also making their everyday Internet experience better.

Is the Google mobile revolution yet to come? What do you think?

This post was originally published on ActiveMobi.