FAQs about the April 21st mobile-friendly update

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.

Test individual URLs in real-time with 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.

Mobile Usability in Webmaster Tools provides a snapshot of your entire site's mobile-friendliness

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