Today is the big day when Google is launching its mobile friendly ranking algorithm update. Google has recently announced that this update has been designed to speed up the ranking of mobile friendly pages in Google’s mobile search results. This update is completely focused on providing higher positions within the search rankings for websites that are optimized to run efficiently on mobile device.

Now mobile users will easily be able to explore search results with text that is readable, web interface that prevents horizontal scrolling and does not requires zooming or tapping.

Google has also confirmed that this update-

• Affects search rankings only on mobile devices
• Affects search results in all languages globally
• Applied only for individual pages, not entire websites

This is the first time Google has publicly announced that mobile sites will be offered preferential treatment within the organic search results. In the past, updates have been more focused on mobile sites being both configured properly and view-able on modern devices.

Now, mobile-friendliness is to be used as a ranking factor in Google search results and sites that are not fully optimized for mobile platform will begin to be left behind.

So, now its time to check your website with the mobile-friendly test and along with it you can also check the entire status of your website with Mobile usability report in Webmaster Tools.

Remember if pages on your site are not mobile friendly, it may lead to significant decrease in mobile traffic from Google search. Once your site becomes mobile-friendly, Google will automatically crawl and index your pages. In order to accelerate this process, websites can use Fetch as Google with Submit to Index for allowing web pages to be treated as mobile-friendly in ranking.