Google To Use Mobile Version Of A Site To Determine Mobile Rankings

If you’re trying to get ranked on Google search, there are a bunch of criteria that you’d have to meet in order for Google to consider you good enough to be ranked highly (as in you’ll appear in the first few returns in search results). The same is also applied to mobile search, but Google is looking to tweak it slightly.

Google has recently announced that they will now use a website’s mobile version to determine its ranking in mobile search. This means that for websites that typically focus on the desktop version, webmasters for those websites will probably need to step up their mobile efforts if they’re hoping to get ranked highly in mobile search as well.

This means that websites will need to contain the same “high quality” content as the desktop website, structured data and Metadata should be on both versions of the site, and that no changes are required if a separate URL is used for the mobile site. According to Google, “Currently our crawling, indexing, and ranking systems typically look at the desktop version of a page’s content, which may cause issues for mobile searchers when that version is vastly different from the mobile version.”

“Mobile-first indexing means that we’ll use the mobile version of the content for indexing and ranking, to better help our – primarily mobile – users find what they’re looking for.” These changes probably won’t affect end users too much, but it does highlight how Google’s efforts are starting to focus more on mobile.

Tyler Lee
Categories: Cellphones, General
Tags: Google