Microsoft announced today that it will begin using mobile friendliness as a signal in Bing’s search ranking algorithm for results that are requested from a mobile device. It’s a move designed to make results delivered through the search engine more useful for people who are browsing the web on their phones, so they know that they’ll be getting a website that works well with their device.
Desktop results will be unaffected by the change, and Microsoft said that the most relevant results will still get top billing in Bing’s results. Bing already offers a small “mobile-friendly” label next to results, and this move is just an extension of that program. In order to determine whether a site plays well with mobile devices, Microsoft looks at a variety of factors, including whether media is available without Flash, if a page requires horizontal scrolling and if navigation elements can be easily tapped by a finger.
The announcement comes after Google made a similar move last month. Microsoft’s criteria seem to largely square with what its competitor in the search industry already put in place. At the time, a Moz study showed that 70 percent of first-page Google results were already mobile-friendly, so it seems unlikely that Microsoft’s algorithm change will herald a massive shake-up in search rankings.
The change is based on research that Microsoft did into Bing users’ behavior that showed they were able to more quickly access the information that they were searching for when search results returned a large number of mobile friendly sites, compared to results that didn’t. With mobile web traffic continuing to grow, offering a good experience for smartphone users is key for both website administrators and search engines, especially if Bing is going to compete with Google.
