Google’s Push for a More Mobile Internet

I'll admit that I don't particularly like to use social media myself for my own business purposes, but it is often a necessary avenue for many. Much like for my own day to day purposes, I don't have a great deal of personal need to rank well in Google (most of the Gordon Wallaces in the world appear to be either footballers or Physicists). But while I don't have a particular need to benefit from these myself, I do have to be aware of changing trends and popular topics as they flare up in order to properly assist the direction of our own products as well as answer client questions or concerns.

So, let's talk a little bit about Google's (seemingly) new push for a more mobile-friendly internet.

Whenever I talk about Google, I always feel the need to preface things by reiterating to the audience that they are a business, and as a business need to generate a profit. They still primarily do this through their ad revenue (more on that topic here if you like). Though they are currently experimenting with a subscription based model to replace Adwords on certain participating sites, with the volume of traffic they receive to Google.com you're not going to see that revenue mix changing dramatically any time soon.

So, how do they keep the traffic flowing to Google.com and keep their revenue up? Keep a positive user experience going – and on mobile that means highlighting sites as "mobile friendly" before you click through.

I've been hearing about this for a few days as I scroll past various experts and their studies flow through my Google+ stream (for those paying attention, I said I didn't like to use if for my own business purposes, but I still enjoy it on a personal level), so I decided to take a random sampling of a few clients and see if they had it applied yet. The end result? Some, but not all. The more interesting thing to me is that not only have they not rolled this out across all websites in their index (that'll take some time, as of 2008 Google had a TRILLION unique URLs indexed and, really, it's unnecessary to worry about how big it is today other than to say a lot more).

And they do appear to be flagging individual pages with this tag, see the Cherry Creek Properties example above.

Now here's the funny thing, Google has all sorts of different themes or styles of snippets. A snippet is discrete packet that makes up each Google search result (so the blue link, plus the green URL, plus the grey description equals a 'snippet'). A while back, to increase adoption of Google Places more than anything, in my opinion, Google introduced rich snippets whereby they try to add additional information if the match is unique / distinct enough. For example, if you Google for, say, your local Home Depot (search: "home depot, city, state") you should see a snippet that displays store hours. For the purposes of real estate, one such form of rich snippet is where secondary or related pages appear in the results. Now notice on the RE/MAX Allegiance example, the primary result is flagged as Mobile-friendly, but none of those secondary links are (I mean, the pages themselves are mobile friendly, just Google isn't flagging them explicitly).

Which brings me to my final example, Coldwell Banker Horizon. Now, and I apologize for this, but I always add an S to the end of the brokerage name for some reason (I always have, probably will never learn!). But, I'm glad that I do because this led me to an interesting discovery. First, I Googled 'coldwell banker horizons' and got the snippet that contained the Mobile-friendly tag, but then realized my error and removed the S. Well, what do you know, Google served up a different snippet style and this time it didn't have the Mobile-friendly tag!

So all that really means is that although Google is going through and updating a whole LOT of search engine results with a Mobile-friendly tag, you may not see it even if your site is, in fact, mobile friendly for now, depending on the snippet that gets used. And, of course, the irony is that while I performed these tests this morning, at the time of writing this (2:38PM same day), the snippet was updated to include the Mobile-friendly tag. For a possible explanation of what may have happened, you can follow this post on G+, though I doubt I will hear anything.

For more information on this subject, I recommend you visit: https://www.stonetemple.com/googles-gary-illyes-discusses-mobile-as-a-ranking-factor/

And then you can go here and plug in your own URL in if you're curious about whether or not you will eventually get this tag applied to you in mobile search results: https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/mobile-friendly/

To view the original article, visit the Lone Wolf blog.