Google Continues Testing Mobile Friendly Notices In Search Results, This Time With Text Version

Two weeks ago, Google began testing mobile-friendly icons in the mobile search results, next to sites that were mobile-friendly. Maybe giving a carrot to sites that adopted good mobile-friendly web site practices? Yesterday, Google tried the opposite approach by testing non mobile-friendly icons in the mobile search results, next to sites that were supposedly not […]

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Two weeks ago, Google began testing mobile-friendly icons in the mobile search results, next to sites that were mobile-friendly. Maybe giving a carrot to sites that adopted good mobile-friendly web site practices?

Yesterday, Google tried the opposite approach by testing non mobile-friendly icons in the mobile search results, next to sites that were supposedly not mobile-friendly. Maybe trying to use the “stick” approach, with negative incentives for web sites to deploy a good mobile-friendly web site practice?

Today, I spotted Google testing the carrot approach, positive incentives, but this time not displaying a graphical icon but rather a text phrase that reads in gray “mobile-friendly.”

Here is a screen shot I was able to see on my iPhone 6, running iOS 8, using the native Safari browser:

google-text-mobile-friendly-icon

You can see, they even label the sitelinks as mobile-friendly.

Clearly Google is looking to label either mobile-friendly results or non-mobile friendly results. How they do it exactly is currently being tested. As we covered earlier, Google may be adding mobile UX factors to their ranking signals in the future.


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.

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