Google says goodbye to its ‘mobile-friendly’ label

20th Oct 2016

Google says there is no longer a need to display the mobile friendly label

About two years ago, Google introduced a ‘mobile friendly’ label to help users identify sites – when doing a search – that would give them an optimal mobile experience (remember those pesky sites where you’d have to scroll up, down and left to right just to read a line?!)

It was a useful tool to guide users during the period of time between then – when ‘mobile responsiveness’ was just becoming a trend – and now, when that responsiveness is a virtual given.

So successful has Google’s (fairly insistent) programme of encouraging mobile responsiveness that the search giant has now been able to de-clutter its own search results pages by dropping the label altogether.

At a staggering 85% mobile-friendly compliance within mobile search results, Google says there is no longer a need to display the label, although the search engine’s mobile friendly algorithms will continue to crawl sites and rank those with mobile-friendly compliance higher than those without.

If you’re not sure about your mobile site’s compliance, there are a number of ways you can check. You can use Google’s mobile-friendly testing tool and/or check your mobile usability report in the Google Search Console.

If you need help with the user-experience of your website,  please don’t hesitate to contact us or call 01223 550800

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