Search engine Bing has said that it will follow Google’s Mobilegeddon move and roll out its own mobile-friendly ranking system in the months ahead. Bing has been outlining how it is to determine whether a webpage is mobile-friendly, when it intends adding the label mobile-friendly to sites, and what sites need to be doing to ensure the content on them is mobile-friendly.
Bing has declined to name a specific date for the roll out of its mobile-friendly algorithm; instead, its approach is to ensure webmaster feedback at each stage of the process, so as to establish better lines of communication and alleviate any possible anxiety.
The search engine has already begun testing its mobile-friendly label in Bing mobile search results and has said that the feedback it has been getting in testing has been “great.” Based on the positive feedback, Bing has indicated that it is ready to begin applying the mobile-friendly label more broadly.
Bing has clarified that the mobile-friendly label will not surpass relevancy in search rankings, so even those sites not deemed mobile-friendly but with more relevant articles and other digital content will in all probability continue to rank highly compared to purely non-mobile-friendly sites. Bing has declined to reveal how many pages in its index are mobile-friendly at the present time or the potential impact of this, but it has said that the date of the full roll out of the new algorithm will be disclosed prior to the launch.
Bing is also rolling out a new tool for webmasters for the testing of sites, with a launch date sometime in the summer. The new tool will be similar to the mobile-friendly testing tool developed by Google in that it will give a yes/no answer to whether a site is mobile-friendly and offer suggestions on how to make a site mobile-friendly in the event of a negative answer. The results delivered by the tool should be in line with Bing mobile results using the mobile-friendly label. Bing deems sites either mobile-friendly or not, just as Google does, so there are no different levels of mobile-friendliness at the present time.
