Latest Google Algorithm focuses on Mobile-friendly search
Google coming up with new algorithm after a break is nothing new. Since search is its core product offering, google keeps it competitive to keep its user trust and industry proficiency intact. With a long history of algorithm changes, google has come a long way. Initially it was about right content as a necessity to be shown at the top and there came Panda.
Next it hit the phising companies with a serious blow. Poor link building quality from phising sites were not only side-tracked, but even penalized. Penguin algorithm took care of irrelevant and incorrect information being used to cleverly manipulate search mechanisms. Since for google, protecting its users from useless and misleading searches is top priority. Its algorithms are built to identify what a user must be most likely looking for and acknowledging the sites that provides the best information.
This is the first time google has announced an algorithm update prior to its release with a specific date. It is understandable since webmasters would need to make a lot of changes to their existing web pages to make them mobile-friendly if they haven't yet already. Since this is going to be an algorithm running on real time, any page that has gone mobile-friendly will be indexed as soon as its crawled.
Google announced two weeks back that a new mobile-friendly ranking factor will be added on April 21st 2015. It will work on a page-by-page basis in real time, Google said. By real time it means that once google crawls a web page it will instantly marked as mobile-friendly and hence benefit from the new algorithm. Since the algorithm will be applied on 21st April, its best for webmasters to get their websites mobile-friendly prior to that to get the benefit.
The second most important aspect of this Google update is, it will run on a page-by-page basis. The algorithm won't work on a website as a whole, rather on all its pages individually. So, if 2 of your pages are mobile-friendly and rest are not, then only those 2 pages will be indexed. Although in many cases, all pages of a website maynot be possible to make mobile-friendly.
Criteria:
The criteria are simple:
The pages must be configured with meta tags
No fixed width must be there
Readable font sizes
Clickable links and buttons
Primary content must not be in flash
The responsiveness of the site must not change the URL or HTML of the pages
Google has issued a 'guide to mobile-friendly sites' along with a testing tool to check if google considers your page to be mobile friendly, on top of providing a mobile usability report, which can be used by webmasters to find out the mobile usability issues of their website.