What Is the Mobile Algorithm Update?
Think back to the last time you landed on a site that wasn't optimized for mobile. Chances are, you needed to zoom and then swipe side-to-size to even read what was on the page. And when you went to go click on something, your fingers could barely select the tiny links. I'm going to bet good money that you just bounced from that page -- with all the information on the internet, you didn't need to waste your time on a website with a really poor user experience.
Google's realized how frustrating this whole experience is and decided to change their algorithm accordingly. Soon, when someone's searching on a mobile device, Google will serve up sites that are easy to read, make navigations and links easy to tap, have images appropriately sized for the device, and more generally, make information easy to find.
Back to the algorithm update. At the moment, Google denotes which sites are mobile-friendly in their mobile search results (below is an example of what that looks like). They'll be actually rewarding and penalizing websites for their mobile experience.
We tested all of our sites, see the image above for what the results look like!
TEST YOUR SITE HERE:
Enter your website's URL into Google's Mobile-Friendly Test and it will let you know if you've got a mobile-friendly page on your hands. If the website you entered passes Google's test, you will see a green banner indicating the website is mobile-friendly. If the website does not pass, Google will let you know the page is not mobile-friendly and give some reasons why.
Many of the common reasons why a website isn't mobile-friendly is because:
- The content is wider than the screen: This requires users to scroll side-to-side to read the page.
- The text too small: This means the user must zoom to read text on the page.
- The links are too close together: On a smartphone, links should be easy to tap with your fingers -- this means that the links should be big enough and in natural location to tap. Most smartphone users hold their phone in their right hand and tap links with their thumb.
- The mobile viewport isn't set: This is a little more on the technical side of things, but the mobile viewport controls the width of the page for the device. If your website displays a desktop landscape when smartphone visitors land on your page, then the viewport is not set for mobile on that page. This is an extra special case where responsive design comes in handy - responsive design will automatically adjust the viewport based on the device.
This is part of an article written by HubSpot. To see complete article, visit here.
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