Helping users find mobile-friendly pages

Tuesday, November 18, 2014

Have you ever tapped on a Google Search result on your mobile phone, only to find yourself looking
at a page where the text was too small, the links were tiny, and you had to scroll sideways to see
all the content? This usually happens when the website has not been optimized to be viewed on a
mobile phone.

This can be a frustrating experience for our mobile searchers. Starting today, to make it easier
for people to find the information that they’re looking for, we’re adding a “mobile-friendly”
label to our mobile search results.

This change will be rolling out globally over the next few weeks. A page is eligible for the
“mobile-friendly” label if it meets the following criteria as detected by Googlebot:

• Avoids software that is not common on mobile devices, like Flash
• Uses text that is readable without zooming
• Sizes content to the screen so users don’t have to scroll horizontally or zoom
• Places links far enough apart so that the correct one can be easily tapped

If you want to make sure that your page meets the mobile-friendly criteria:

• Check your pages with the
  Mobile-Friendly Test
• Read our updated documentation on our
  Webmasters Mobile Guide
  on how to create and improve your mobile site
• See the
  Mobile usability report
  in Google Webmaster Tools, which highlights major mobile usability issues across your entire
  site, not just one page
• Check our
  how-to guide for third-party software
  like WordPress or Joomla, in order to migrate your website hosted on a CMS (Content Management
  System) to use a mobile-friendly template

The tools and documentation above are currently available in English. They will be available in
additional languages within the next few weeks.

We see these labels as a first step in helping mobile users to have a better mobile web
experience. We are also experimenting with using the mobile-friendly criteria as a ranking signal.

If you have any questions or want to help others make mobile-friendly sites, visit our
Webmaster Help Forum.
We hope to see many more mobile-friendly websites in the future. Let’s make the web better for all
users!

Posted by
Ryoichi Imaizumi
and
Doantam Phan,
Google Mobile Search