Tuesday, April 21, 2015
We'd like to share answers to your frequently asked questions. For background, in February, we announced that the mobile-friendly update will boost the rankings of mobile-friendly pages—pages that are legible and usable on mobile devices—in mobile search results worldwide. (Conversely, pages designed for only large screens may see a significant decrease in rankings in mobile search results.) To get us all on the same page, here are the most frequently asked questions:
General FAQs
1. Will desktop and/or tablet ranking also be affected by this change?
No, this update has no effect on searches from tablets or desktops. It affects searches from
mobile devices across all languages and locations.
2. Is it a page-level or site-level mobile ranking boost?
It's a page-level change. For instance, if ten of your site's pages are mobile-friendly, but the
rest of your pages aren't, only the ten mobile-friendly pages can be positively impacted.
3. How do I know if Google thinks a page on my site is mobile-friendly?
Individual pages can be tested for "mobile-friendliness" using the
Mobile-Friendly Test.
To review site-level information on mobile-friendliness, check out the Mobile Usability report in Webmaster Tools. This feature's data is based on the last time we crawled and indexed your site's pages.
4. Unfortunately, my mobile-friendly pages won't be ready until after April 21st. How long
before they can be considered mobile-friendly in ranking?
We determine whether a page is mobile-friendly every time it's crawled and indexed—you don't
have to wait for another update. Once a page is mobile-friendly, you can wait for
Googlebot for smartphones
to naturally (re-)crawl and index the page or you can expedite processing by using
Fetch as Google with Submit to Index
in
Webmaster Tools. For a large volume of
URLs, consider submitting a