Google Strongly Encouraging Webmasters To Adopt Autocomplete On Forms For Mobile

Google says webmasters should implement autocomplete markup to improve mobile user conversions but does not go as far to say it will be a ranking factor.

Chat with SearchBot

google-mobile-smartphones-blue-ss-1920

Google’s latest blog post on the Webmaster Central blog is encouraging webmasters to adopt and implement autocomplete on web forms on your mobile web sites.

Google’s Mathieu Perreault from the Chrome team and Zineb Ait Bahajji from the Webmaster Trends team said:

Making websites friendly and easy to browse for users on mobile devices is very important. We hope to see many forms marked up with the “autocomplete” attribute in the future.

I asked Gary Illyes from Google if this is a hint to webmasters that eventually autocomplete on forms would be baked into the mobile-friendly ranking algorithm? He said “nope,” adding that he is “not hinting anything” related to that.

Instead, they just think it is a good idea to increase conversions and improve mobile user satisfaction.


About the author

Barry Schwartz
Staff
Barry Schwartz is a Contributing Editor to Search Engine Land and a member of the programming team for SMX events. He owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics. Barry can be followed on Twitter here.

Get the must-read newsletter for search marketers.