Google to boost the mobile-friendly ranking factor in May 2016

Google will be increasing the mobile friendly ranking factor in the upcoming months but stresses that high quality content can and will rank even when it is not mobile friendly.

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Google announced they will be increasing “the effect of the ranking signal” for the mobile friendly ranking update. Google said this boost will happen at the beginning of May and will roll out gradually over time. It is not expected that this update will be as significant as the initial update on April 21, 2015.

Klemen Kloboves, a Google Software Engineer, wrote:

Today we’re announcing that beginning in May, we’ll start rolling out an update to mobile search results that increases the effect of the ranking signal to help our users find even more pages that are relevant and mobile-friendly.

“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 well if it has great, relevant content,” Kloboves added.

Sites already mobile friendly do not need to worry or do anything. You can use the mobile friendly testing tool to make sure your pages are mobile ready for Google and also read Google’s mobile guidelines.


About the author

Barry Schwartz
Staff
Barry Schwartz a Contributing Editor to Search Engine Land and a member of the programming team for SMX events. He owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics. Barry's personal blog is named Cartoon Barry and he can be followed on Twitter here.

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