Living in the Mobilegeddon
Last April, Google updated their searching algorithm for mobile devices to consider whether a website has a mobile friendly site. If the website does have a mobile friendly site, then it would be higher up in search results. If the website does not have a mobile friendly site, then it would be lower in search results. Thus, searching had entered a new era for mobile browsing—the Mobilegeddon. This era is thriving as Google recently announced that over half of all worldwide Google searches happened on mobiles instead of desktops.
This article goes over many factors that boost the page rank of a site for mobile devices. Websites that load faster are higher on the mobile rank because Google factors in the limited bandwidth of smaller screen mobile devices. Additionally, Google prefers that websites use html5 rather than flash to display the sites contents, as flash has less mobile capabilities. Therefore, sites that are ranked higher on a desktop that use flash may not be ranked higher on mobile devices. Html5 is a better alternative than flash to ensure that the site’s contents are correctly displayed. Content-wise, the site should contain more content and keywords. The average word count for mobile sites has been increasing and this allows the usage of more keywords. Google even considers the readability of the sites and user experience factors for optimizing mobile sites when ranking mobile pages.
In class, we learned that Google created an algorithm for web searches that ranked pages called PageRank. A page is ranked by how many relevant websites are linked to them. That is sites with more in-links from relevant webpages will be higher up in search results. The Page rank algorithm contributed a lot to Google’s success and solved many problems with searching in the pre-PageRank era. Nowadays, there is not a problem of scarcity but of abundance. Sites need to maximize their page rank scores to come up on top of other sites. With mobile devices, Google has updated their algorithm over the years to consider more variables than just the number of links linked to a site. A strong example is how Google updated their PageRank algorithm for mobile devices to consider if the webpage was mobile friendly. If the webpage is not mobile friendly then it would be ranked lower and not show up as one of the first results in a Google search. This is a more in-depth PageRank that we learned in class that considers many more variables to be ranked higher up. The Google searches will be just as good as before, but more relevant for mobile devices. I remember that I used to get annoyed when I clicked on a website that was not mobile friendly or optimized for phones. In the Mobilegeddon age, I will see mobile friendly pages higher up in my searches.
Source: http://searchengineland.com/report-take-rank-mobile-search-results-233280
http://searchengineland.com/library/google/google-mobile-friendly-update