It's no secret that there is more search traffic coming from mobile devices than anything else out there, and that more websites are becoming increasingly mobile-friendly to meet the high demand coming from their users. Search engines are adapting to this trend as well.
Even though Bing has lately seen more growth in the desktop search market, Microsoft is taking mobile seriously, too. The company has updated its search engine with a new feature that will help Bing users on mobile devices save time when looking for things on the web.
Bing's ranking algorithm will now rank mobile-friendly websites higher in search results, but will not penalize other websites if they are more relevant for your specific search query. In order to be classified as "mobile-friendly", a website will be evaluated considering these four factors:
- Navigation: Menus, buttons and links on the page have to be large enough and well spaced, for easy touch navigation, which is a no-brainer.
- Readability: The text on the page needs to adapt its font size and layout so that it doesn't require effort to read, by having to scroll or zoom.
- Scrolling: While vertical scrolling is absolutely acceptable, panning or horizontal scrolling is not considered an optimum experience.
- Compatibility: If the page contains media that requires proprietary plug-ins due to various reasons such as copyright issues or distribution decisions, it is not considered mobile-friendly.
This may seem like a small improvement, but it should make life a lot easier for mobile users, and is only a part of what Microsoft is doing to make Bing better for mobile devices. Even better, the Redmond company is also listening for your feedback on how to make it better for users outside the U.S., so be sure to make your voice heard.
Source: Bing Blogs
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