Google starts ranking sites in Search results based on their mobile version

Google is making web browsing a better experience for smartphone users around the globe. The search giant a year ago said it was test ranking those websites on its search results, which have a mobile-friendly version. Now, its implementation has started taking place. In simple words, websites with mobile-friendly design will get priority in search results.

For those unaware, Google started testing this feature a year ago. For now, the search giant ranks website based on their desktop design. “To recap, currently our crawling, indexing, and ranking systems typically look at the desktop version of a page’s content, which may cause issues for mobile searchers when that version is vastly different from the mobile version,” said the Google webmasters blog post.

“Mobile-first indexing means that we’ll use the mobile version of the content for indexing and ranking, to better help our – primarily mobile – users find what they’re looking for,” added the firm.

The firm says that those websites that make use of a ‘responsive’ design layout won’t have to do anything. However, the company has still given some extra tips to webmasters to ensure their website is ready for mobile-first indexing.

Some of the pointers include:

-High quality content including text, images with alt-attributes and videos in crawlable and indexable formats.
-Structured data should also be present for better search result crawling. “Ensure URLs within the structured data are updated to the mobile version on the mobile pages,” adds the firm.
The desktop and the mobile versions should also have metadata tags/descriptions.
-Website creators should also keep a check on the servers on which the site is based on.
-They should have enough capacity to handle increased crawl rate. “This doesn’t affect sites that use responsive web design and dynamic serving, only sites where the mobile version is on a separate host, such as m.example.com,” says Google.
It has been added that the process has already been started for ‘a handful of sites’.