Google Says Mobile Friendly By April 21 Or Else!
More than half of the traffic coming to your website now comes from mobile devices – smartphones, tablets, etc. That’s important so we are going to say it again:
Half of the traffic to your web site comes from mobile devices!
At Webline, we’ve been recommending responsive websites to our clients for years. By responsive, we mean sites that automatically change their layout to best represent your content depending on the device (or even better the screen size of the device) your visitor is using to view your site.
How do you know if your site is responsive? Easy! If you visit the site on your phone and you have to pinch and zoom, if the text is tiny, if the page is hard to read – it isn’t responsive. On the flip side, if the text is large, if there is a menu button that you can tap to view the navigation, and if you don’t need to pinch and zoom and drag left and right, then your site is responsive!
Effective responsive sites are websites where not just the design, but also the navigation and content are all optimized for viewing on desktops, laptops, tablets, smartphones, and everything inbetween. This requires understanding how people use their smartphones and why they use them, emphasizing contact information and de-emphasizing large images along with countless other tweaks when viewing the site on smaller devices. The responsive websites Webline designs use current best practices and a deep understanding of mobile browsing to create effective experiences on mobile devices.
And, Webline has always promoted responsive websites as a better solution than separate mobile sites. Why? First, it is always easier to manage one site instead of two. Second, it is easier to give out one domain instead of two. Our clients have never had urls like m.website.com or website.mobi. Third, and most important, separate mobile sites with duplicate content are not search engine friendly.
When Google indexes web sites, it attempts to determine if each site is the most authoritative on a topic. While they keep their exact algorithms a secret, one factor is whether your content is unique or not. Two web pages with the same content are by default not authoritative, and as a result, both get penalized. Google doesn’t “understand” that they are really the same site because they use different domain names.
The beauty (from a search perspective) of responsive sites is that the domain never changes. You have one site to maintain, one url to promote, and one site in Google’s eyes. It is the same site – it just looks different.
Well Google just upped the stakes. Beginning on April 21, 2015 Google will start factoring how mobile friendly your site is when determining ranking. This is a big deal! Having a separate mobile site won’t help your main site at all (not that it ever really did). Even if you don’t care about mobile users, the time to make your website responsive is now. Otherwise, your ranking will go down and you will have less desktop users as well.
Want to know if you site is mobile friendly? Visit:
Want to hear it directly from the horse’s mouth:
As always, Webline stands ready to help our clients and friends! Whether we built your site originally or not, we are confident that we can update your site to a responsive search engine friendly site today!
The clock is ticking! Email us at Info@WeblineDesigns.com today!
