Google will be making changes in mobile search rankings

Google announced recently a change that will be implemented this July about mobile search rankings of websites.

The Internet search giant said it would use page speed as a factor in determining who lands at the top tier of mobile searches.

People care about page speed

In a blog post, Zhiheng Wang and Doantam Phan of Google said: “People want to be able to find answers to their questions as fast as possible,” as they cited studies showing that “people really care about the speed of a page.”

They said that although page speed had been used in ranking sites; it was mainly focused on desktop searches.

Speed update

Wang and Phan called the change that will take effect in July as “Speed Update,” which, according to TechCrunch, will “downrank very slow websites under certain conditions.”

Wang and Phan said the “Speed Update,” will only impact pages “that deliver the slowest experience to users and will only affect a small percentage of queries.”

But they also said a “slow page may still rank highly if it has great, relevant content.”

 

Wang and Phan urged site developers to study how about page performance affects a user’s experience and to use various user experience tools like Chrome User Experience Report, Lighthouse, and PageSpeed Insights.

TechCrunch said Google had been prioritizing page speed for some time, recalling that in February 2016, the company began to highlight Accelerated Mobile Page (AMP) sites (pages using its AMP technology for mobile rendering) in search results, and then in April 2016 gave AMP pages more prominence in Google News.

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