Effective from 21st April 2015, Google will be placing considerably more emphasis on mobile-friendliness as a ranking signal. The change will affect all mobile searches globally, irrespective of the language used, and undoubtedly it will have a significant impact on search results. It will be much easier thereafter for cell phone, tablet etc. users to receive high quality search results that are optimized for their device.

The change should eliminate situations where users looking at search results on their mobile ‘phone are presented with pages where the text is too small, links are tiny and/or too close together (making it difficult to select a particular link) or you have to keep scrolling sideways to see all of the content of a page. These situations are all too common when a website is not mobile-friendly.

Google plan to roll out the change globally over the coming days. Website pages will be considered mobile-friendly by Google if they meet the following criteria:

1.They avoid the use of software such as Flash which is not commonly used for mobile devices.

2.The text on the pages can be read without having to zoom.

3.The content of pages is sized to fit the mobile screen without the need for horizontal scrolling or zooming.

4.There is sufficient distance between links to allow the desired link to be easily tapped without accidentally hitting a different link.

You can check if your site is mobile-friendly by using Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test tool.

Websites that do not meet the requirements are likely to be drastically downgraded in Google’s rankings and suffer as a result.

(Courtesy of Pukka Websites – https://pukkawebsites.com)