Hot off the press is an announcement by Google that they will now be taking mobile one step further in their search results and this will benefit people who have websites that are mobile friendly.
Grab your mobile phone, fire up Google and perform a search. As always a list of results will come up – click through to some of these results. You’ll no doubt arrive on a number of websites that are not optimised for mobile devices so you’ll either arrive at a site that requires a lot of sideways scrolling or text that is too small and so the list goes on. It’s an issue because Google isn’t leading people to the most optimal websites.. which is their business model afterall.
As of today, Google is rolling out a new feature whereby in the results, sites that are mobile optimised, will now receive a “mobile-friendly” next to their website, like this:
Google has announced that they’ll be rolling this out globally over the next few weeks and your website will qualify if it meets the following requirements:
- Avoids software that is not common on mobile devices, like Flash
- Uses text that is readable without zooming
- Sizes content to the screen so users don’t have to scroll horizontally or zoom
- Places links far enough apart so that the correct one can be easily tapped
If you’re got a website and you want to know whether you fit the criteria you’ll be pleased to know that Google has launched a Mobile-Friendly Testing Tool.
