New Zealand Blog
Google news for Kiwis
Mobilegeddon? We’re going for mobiletopia
Wednesday, April 22, 2015
As we flagged in
February
, we’re making a change to our search rankings, to include ‘mobile-friendliness’ as one of the many criteria we use to rank search results.
There have been a few misconceptions flying around about this change, so we wanted to clear them up.
Firstly, mobile-friendliness is
just one of 200 signals
that we use to determine the ranking of results.
Sites that aren’t as mobile-friendly as they could be
won’t
disappear. In fact, they may still rank highly if they contain great content that people really want.
And again, just to be really clear, this is
just for mobile results
.
Why are we making this change? Well, we’ve all experienced bad mobile sites. Miniscule font, links that require Tinkerbell’s tiny fingers to click, or a sideways scroll that last for ever and ever and ever and ever. Which is a real problem, because mobiles are increasingly how we access the internet. The vast majority of Kiwis now have smartphones, and we use them daily.
Bad sites are bad for business too: visitors abandon websites that aren’t mobile friendly at higher rates.
Research shows
74% of people say they are more likely to return to a mobile-friendly site. What does ‘mobile-friendliness’ look like? Check out the image below.
The good news is that creating a mobile-friendly site doesn't have to be expensive or time-consuming: it
can be as simple as adjusting website settings or picking out a design you like
. Even if you opt to fully redesign your site, a small business website with 10-20 pages could be completed in a day or so.
Webmasters can check if their site is mobile-friendly by examining individual pages with the
Mobile-Friendly Test
or checking the status of the entire site through the
Mobile Usability report
in Webmaster Tools.
In the two months since we announced this change, we’ve seen a 4.7 percentage point increase in the proportion of sites that are mobile friendly, and we hope to see even more in the coming months.
The web doesn’t stand still, and mobiles have been around for eight years. Kiwis deserve to get the best out of the internet, however they access it. These changes are designed to help with this.
Posted by Lisa Bora, Head of Mobile, Google Australia/New Zealand
Labels
android
antarctica
birthday
christchurch
chrome
competition
computer science
CS4HS
digital economy
doodle 4 google
doodles
education
google apps
Google Apps for Business
Google apps for education
google docs
google earth
Google Maps
Google places
Google Search
HR
internet
IT
Lego
livestream
localisation
mobile
navigation
NZ
online advertising
privacy
product launch
real estate
rugby fever
scholarship
schools
science fair
search
search ads
security
street view
students
symphony
traffic
universities
women
workplace culture
youtube
Archive
2017
Jun
May
Mar
Feb
2016
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2015
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Jun
May
Apr
Feb
2014
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Feb
Jan
2013
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Feb
Jan
2012
Dec
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2011
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2010
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2009
Dec
Nov
Oct
Feed
Give us feedback in our
Product Forums
.
