The online world is increasingly mobile. The number of mobile searches now surpasses the number of desktop searches and this gap is widening all the time. In fact, in many countries, mobile is the most common device that people use to access the internet.
This means that it has never been more important to have a good mobile SEO strategy in place. However, in order to come up with a strategy, you first need to understand what recent updates the search engines have implemented regarding mobile.
Here are the some of the most important mobile SEO-related updates from three of the world’s biggest search engines.
1. Mobile SEO on Google
One of the most famous updates took place in April 2015: Mobilegeddon demoted the rankings of websites that were not considered mobile-friendly and caused huge changes in many websites’ rankings (you can check if your website is mobile-friendly here). The next major change was the launch of Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMPs). AMPs are webpages that are really lightweight when it comes to their code, and are designed to load super-fast on a mobile device. They’re so lightweight because they run on a stripped down version of HTML and CSS, and outright ban things like JavaScript. Many websites, especially news websites, are now making their webpages AMP. The latest change to come from Google is mobile-first indexing, whereby the search engine now indexes the mobile version of a website (previously, it indexed the desktop version).
2. Mobile SEO on Yandex
Yandex is the most popular search engine in Russia. In February 2016, it introduced a new algorithm called Vladivostok, which gave mobile-friendly websites a higher search position when users were searching from a mobile device. Webpages were classed as mobile-friendly if they featured vertical rather than horizontal scrolling, and if they excluded Flash, Silverlight and Java applets. More recently, in November 2017, it launched Turbo Pages which are similar to Google’s AMPs and load quickly by only loading text, images and video and by using stripped down code.
3. Mobile SEO on Baidu
Baidu is the biggest search engine in China. At the beginning of 2017, it launched its own version of AMPs called Mobile Index Pages (MIPs). Over 1 billion pages are now MIPs. To make things more interesting, Baidu is now also recognising and indexing websites built with Google’s AMP technology. However, differently from their own MIPs, these do not get any special icons, which means that apart from speed AMPs don’t receive any special boost in Baidu’s results.
I hope this has given you a useful introduction to mobile SEO. For more in-depth information, read our free guide below.
Natalia Witczyk
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