Tuesday, April 21, 2015
As
we noted earlier this year, today's the day we begin globally rolling out our mobile-friendly update. We're boosting the ranking of mobile-friendly pages on mobile search results. Now searchers can more easily find high-quality and relevant results where text is readable without tapping or zooming, tap targets are spaced appropriately, and the page avoids unplayable content or horizontal scrolling.
April 21st's mobile-friendly update boosts mobile search rankings for pages that are legible and usable on mobile devices.
This update:
- Affects only search rankings on mobile devices
- Affects search results in all languages globally
- Applies to individual pages, not entire websites
While the mobile-friendly change is important, we still use a variety of signals to rank search results. The intent of the search query is still a very strong signal -- so even if a page with high quality content is not mobile-friendly, it could still rank high if it has great content for the query.
To check if your site is mobile-friendly, you can examine individual pages with the
Mobile-Friendly Test
or check the status of your entire site through the
Mobile Usability report in Webmaster Tools
. If your site's pages aren't mobile-friendly, there may be a significant decrease in mobile traffic from Google Search. But have no fear, once your site
becomes mobile-friendly
, we will automatically re-process (i.e., crawl and index) your pages. You can also expedite the process by using
Fetch as Google with Submit to Index
, and then your pages can be treated as mobile-friendly in ranking.
Questions? See
our FAQ
or ask on the
Mobile Websites section of the Webmaster Forum
.