Bing follows Google to reward mobile friendly sites
Following on from Google’s recent announcement that it would reward mobile friendly web sites, Bing has announced that it too will rolling out a mobile friendly algorithm for Bing mobile search results.
Unlike Google’s “Mobilegeddon” statement Bing said it would work closely with webmasters to roll this out with the least amount of impact. Bing is downplaying the impact the change will have saying that it will not hurt relevancy and that even non-mobile friendly pages with high relevancy will still appear high in it search results.
This is what Bing has to say “Our approach to mobile friendliness as a ranking signal balances the need to improve the ranking for mobile-friendly pages, with the continued focus on delivering the most relevant results for a given query. This means that for mobile searches on Bing, you can always expect to see the most relevant results for a search query ranked higher, even if some of them are not mobile-friendly. While the changes will improve ranking for mobile-friendly pages, webpages that are highly relevant to the given query that are not yet mobile-friendly will not get penalized.”
Bing has not tied these changes to a specific date – but like Google, it too will be bringing out a tool that allows webmasters to test websites and analyze the results against its mobile friendliness classifier.
This was inevitable really and expected but just goes to show how differently the two companies communicate with webmasters. Google effectively lays down the law, while Bing (Microsoft) uses a lighter touch that coaxes the audience into acting. Right or wrong – if your website isn’t mobile friendly then this is just another reason to pull your finger out and do something about it…
Notes: While Google has the lions share of the search market globally – Bing does account for 14% of searches in the US.
