Keeping Your Websites Mobile-friendly is Critical to Google!
It is critical to keep your Websites Mobile-compatible for the primary reason that Google’s indexing norms now follow the rule “Mobile first“. In other words, if your website is not Mobile-friendly, there’s every possibility that your site doesn’t appear or list on Google’s search results even on desktops!
Mobilegeddon:
It all formally started with Mobilegeddon, Google’s search algorithm update of April 21, 2015. The update began to give priority to web sites that display well on smartphones and other Mobile devices. Google chose to do this because many web users were viewing content on Mobile devices rather than on desktop devices.
Google started showing the “Mobile-friendly” tag against sites that had Mobile versions during those times, encouraging Webmasters to make their sites Mobile-compatible. Very soon, most of the sites acquired the required Mobile compatibility, where the tag became unnecessary, and it was removed. The standard of “Being Mobile-friendly” was thus set.
Google at one point decided to split its search engine optimization into a mobile and desktop version, to satisfy both Users & Webmasters belonging to both platforms. This was also to allow sufficient time to Webmasters who had only desktop versions.
Later in November of 2016, Google introduced the concept of Mobile-first indexing. It was in direct response to the new search norm, where users searching the Net on mobile devices heavily outnumbered the ones who search on desktop devices.
Now, if you want your website to be certainly visible to Users in search results, it must be compatible with Mobile devices.
Many Webmasters took the approach of keeping two versions of their sites – one for each platform, in the initial stages. Some sort of “inequality” between these two versions were normal, which adversely affected their visibility in search results (both mobile and desktop searches).
The best approach to the continuously-improving/upgrading search algorithm from Google is to maintain “responsiveness” in your website’s design. “Being Responsive” means your website is able to adjust itself to both Desktop and Mobile devices. There’s no question of any “inequality” in this approach, as the content remains the same for every target device.
Responsiveness is the way to go in today’s fast-changing and aggressively-evolving technological world. Being tied to any device, or to be static in your design & approach is suicidal from the technology point of view .
There are many sites and tools to find out how Mobile-friendly your website is. Check the one from Google itself here.
If you need any help with your website to make it Mobile-friendly, you may contact us.
