Are you a blogger who has been putting off the task of making your blog mobile-friendly? If so, I strongly recommend that you get it done ASAP!
In February of last year Google announced that mobile-friendly websites would soon start ranking higher in their search results than non-mobile-friendly sites.
Well, they are now ready to take their mobile-friendly policy to a new level by using mobile pages to determine the rankings in their search results.
This new “Mobile-First Indexing” algorithm will work by crawling a site’s mobile web pages first and using those pages to determine that blog’s overall rankings in the search results.
In their blog post announcing the change, Google indicated that sites with desktop-only versions of its pages will still be crawled and indexed, but ranking preference will be given to sites that are mobile-friendly.
That means if your blog doesn’t have a mobile version, its pages are likely to be ranked lower than most – or even all – of the sites that are mobile-friendly for a given search term.
There’s another thing for you to consider as well: If your blog is mobile friendly but the mobile pages have less content than the desktop pages, your blog’s rankings will still probably drop simply because there is less content on those pages for Googlebot to crawl and index.
That’s why I’m recommending that you change your blog’s structure as needed in order to make the content of the mobile pages match the content on the desktop pages as closely as possible.
If your blog is powered by WordPress you can easily make it mobile-friendly in one of two ways:
1 – Replace your blog’s current theme with a “responsive” theme that automatically serves mobile-friendly pages to users with mobile devices.
2 – Install a plugin like WP Mobile Edition that will instantly make your blog mobile-friendly just as soon as you activate it.
If you think your blog might be mobile-friendly, but you just aren’t sure, you can find out in seconds with the help of Google’s handy Mobile-Friendly Test Tool.
Bottom line: It’s critical that you make your blog mobile friendly right away in order to preserve its search engine rankings!
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