Google has made a large mobile announcement today, showing new efforts to encourage webmasters to ensure their web sites are mobile-friendly. Google has officially gone live with the mobile friendly label today, they launched a brand-new mobile testing tool and told us they are experimenting with new mobile-friendly ranking factors in their search ranking algorithm.
Mobile-Friendly Label
As we explained on our sister-site, over the next few weeks, mobile searchers will soon be able to see a new label in the search results snippets for pages that are mobile-friendly. The new label will look something like this:
Google said they are showing this to reduce mobile-searcher frustration and encourage webmasters to build a better mobile experience for their users.
New Mobile Testing Tool
To help webmasters learn if their sites/pages qualify for the mobile label and what they can do to improve the mobile-friendly design of their site, Google has launched a mobile friendly testing tool. The tool is available at google.com/webmasters/tools/mobile-friendly and it gives you a pass/fail score followed by additional advice depending on the results of the web page.
You can see some screen shots of pass and fails on our sister site.
Google Experimenting With Mobile-Friendly Ranking Factors
Google also told us they are experimenting with a set of new mobile ranking factors around various metrics you would find in the mobile testing tool. Google would not commit to saying if they will go ahead with the ranking factors, but they did tell us they are indeed testing it. Google said:
We see these labels as a first step in helping mobile users to have a better mobile web experience. We are also experimenting with using the mobile-friendly criteria as a ranking signal.
For one thing, Google is clearly sending a message to webmasters that they want you to build mobile-friendly web sites.
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