Google Must Take Mobile Sites into Account for Rankings
Source: https://www.searchenginejournal.com/4-important-ranking-factors-according-seo-industry-studies/184619/
Everyone I know uses Google every single day. Whenever there is something that needs to be understood better, a sports game score that needs to be checked or a certain movie scene needs to be watched, Google is the go-to source. Google seems to have the best system for ranking pages out of all search engines, making it the most widely used engine today. But could their ranking strategy be better?
In class, we discussed how the number of hyperlinks are very important for determining page rankings for a web search. This makes sense, as pages with lots of links leading to it must be very useful and appropriate for searches. Another important piece to the puzzle of determining rankings is actual content (Search Engine Journal). Pages with better content (I do not know how this is determined, but assume the masses of computer geniuses at Google have this figured out) are more likely to be what the searcher is looking for, and therefore a better search result.
Those two criteria, linking and content, are very obvious for determining search rankings. However, as the article states, another piece of information that is considered is whether or not the page has a mobile site. With more and more people using smartphones all throughout their days for work, school or just life in general, the need for web pages to have mobile sites has been increasing drastically. Even if a page has great content and has many links leading up to it, a searcher using their phone in the middle of the woods will have no use for the page if it is not mobile-friendly. This criteria was listed third on the website I looked at, but I believe it is growing in importance over time. Of course, most major websites have mobile-friendly pages now, but in the future it is likely that a much greater percentage of searches will take place on mobile devices and any websites that can only be viewed on a computer will become obsolete. Google should take this into account when writing their ranking programs.