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April 21 is coming-are you ready?
Isn’t April 21 just a regular Tuesday? Not according to Google.
In an official release from Google back in February, they stated the following:
“Starting April 21, we will be expanding our use of mobile-friendliness as a ranking signal. This change will affect mobile searches in all languages worldwide and will have a significant impact in our search results. Consequently, users will find it easier to get relevant, high quality search results that are optimized for their devices.”
Side Note: This really shouldn’t come as a surprise as much of the industry has been leaning towards creating mobile friendly websites anyway. With WordPress templates and other web formats, many developers are putting a large focus on mobile-first development and are paying extra attention to the way websites function on mobile devices. Mobile browser traffic actually crossed over desktop browser traffic last year, so why not develop for mobile?
Google has been working on this process for many years, but is recently making changes such as these. Back in November of 2014, Google made it easier for users to find out which sites are and are not mobile friendly by adding a ‘mobile-friendly’ tag in the search results when using a mobile device:
Starting April 21, this is effect more than just the way you show up on search results. Google will adjust their algorithm and your ranking will be largely based on whether or not your website is mobile friendly.
How do you know if your site is ready for the algorithm change? Google provided some helpful tools:
You can test a few of your pages by visiting this site
You can use your webmaster tools account with Google to get a full list of mobile usability issues across your site
There are also basic responsive design tips that are good indicators:
- Your website must be using mobile compatible software (that means no Flash!)
- Your text should adjust based on the screen size so it is easy to use and doesn’t require any zooming
- Your content sizes horizontally so you don’t have to scroll to the left and right
Look like your site needs some help? Michigan Creative is here for you and your business! We design all of our sites in fully responsive, mobile-friendly templates to ensure that you won’t have any issues with Google and your customers won’t have any issues either! See a few of our sites by visiting our portfolio.
Until next time!
~Melissa