We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again. If your website is not responsive to mobile devices, you are missing out. The mobile/tablet traffic has increased tremendously in the past few month and the trend seems to continue. Prospects are looking at your business now from their mobile phone, tablet or similar devices, not only from their desktop PCs or Laptops. If you fail to have a proper responsive design, not only are you creating less of a user-friendly experience, but now you can actually get penalised by Google, too. The good news is that if you do have a mobile-optimised website, you can even get rewarded for it.

At the moment Google is labeling mobile friendly websites and experimenting with a new algorithm using the mobile-friendly criteria as ranking signal. This makes sense because to every negative point there must be a positive reaction. So if Google is penalising websites that are not mobile optimised, why not actually reward those who do?

So, what does this mean?

Google has added a “Mobile-Friendly” text under the URL in the snippet. If you are searching on Google from your mobile device, the results that come up will be able to show you which sites are mobile friendly, making you more inclined to click on those that you know for sure are mobile-optimised. Why waste time on a website you can’t properly surf on, right? In addition to the “mobile-friendly” text, Google is working on a new algorithm for ranking mobile friendly websites.

Which pages will be recognised as mobile friendly?

Google bot recognises the following points as mobile friendly:

• Readable text, without the need to zoom
• Users don’t have to scroll horizontally to zoom
• Links are far enough apart so that the correct one can be clicked on.
• Software that is not common on mobile devices, like Flash

If you want to check whether Google sees your website as mobile friendly, run the Mobile Friendly Test. If you don’t know what the most important elements of a mobile-optimised website are, read our blog “Key Elements of Mobile Website”.