Trends on Tuesday: Google Will Rank ‘Mobile-Friendly’ Sites Even Higher Beginning in May

Mar 29, 2016

Last year Google began changing their search ranking algorithm to direct mobile users to mobile-friendly sites, and they recently announced that beginning in May they will be implementing an update to focus even more exclusively on boosting mobile-friendly sites.

Screen capture of the why make a website mobile-friendly section on the Google Developers website.

In the announcement, Google encourages website owners to test their sites using the Mobile-Friendly Test and Webmaster Mobile Guide, to learn how to improve your site for mobile friendliness.

Previously we’ve covered how to prepare for “Mobilegeddon” (an industry term for the Google mobile-friendly shift) for government agencies. This is a crucial priority as our mobile audiences are growing by leaps and bounds.

One new solution Google is pushing for sites to move more mobile-friendly the new AMP mobile framework. The open source platform is built to compete with Facebook’s proprietary “Instant Articles” performance platform and to help improve the mobile experience for people using mobile devices, where performance can sometimes be lacking due to cellular network latency and device memory limitations.

Screen capture of Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) Project homepage