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Google is giving another ranking boost to mobile-friendly pages

FILE - In this April 17, 2007 file photo, exhibitors work on laptop computers in front of an illuminated sign of the Google logo at the industrial fair Hannover Messe in Hanover, Germany. According to numbers the company released Friday, Oct. 10, 2014, nearly 145,000 requests have been made in the European Union and four other countries by people looking to polish their online reputations. That’s an average of more than 1,000 requests a day since late May, when Google began accepting submissions to comply with a European court decision that ruled some embarrassing information about people’s lives can be scrubbed from search results. (AP Photo/Jens Meyer, File)

Google announced in April of last year that it tweaked search results to give a ranking boost to sites that offer mobile-friendly versions, and now the Mountain View company is prepping to give even more ranking weight to these sites. The company is planning a change that “increases the effect of the ranking signal” for mobile searches to put even more mobile pages on the top…

Per the Google Webmaster Central blog:

Getting good, relevant answers when you search shouldn’t depend on what device you’re using. You should get the best answer possible, whether you’re on a phone, desktop or tablet. Last year, we started using mobile-friendliness as a ranking signal on mobile searches. 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.

If your site is already mobile-friendly and optimized for the changes that rolled out last year, Google says that you don’t need to change anything to optimize your site for this update. If you’re not sure if your site is considered mobile-friendly by Google, all you have to do is head over to the Webmasters site and give it a try. As you’ll see, all of the 9to5 network has long been in the green.

Google also notes that while this will likely give mobile-friendly pages a boost, it’s definitely not the only ranking signal. “The intent of the search query is still a very strong signal,” the company says. “Even if a page with high quality content is not mobile-friendly, it could still rank well if it has great, relevant content.” For example, I doubt we’ll see a site like Drudge take much of a hit.

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Avatar for Stephen Hall Stephen Hall

Stephen is Growth Director at 9to5. If you want to get in touch, follow me on Twitter. Or, email at stephen (at) 9to5mac (dot) com, or an encrypted email at hallstephenj (at) protonmail (dot) com.