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Google News Ranking Won’t Be Impacted By The New Mobile-Friendly Algorithm

Google News ranking algorithm won't factor in if a publisher is mobile-friendly or not, at least not yet.

Barry Schwartz on March 26, 2015 at 8:57 am

Everyone is preparing for the mobile-friendly Google algorithm which will touch down April 21st. But Google News publishers don’t have to worry just yet, at least in terms of the ranking in the Google News search results.

Google News community manager, Stacie Chan, said in a Google+ hangout yesterday, that as of now, the Google News ranking team has no plans on implementing the mobile-friendly algorithm into the Google News results, at least not yet.

Stacie said this at the 23 minute mark into the video, which I transcribed:

As of now, Google News is not committed to making that change yet. We are always exploring because we think it is awesome that sites are trying to be more mobile friendly. I love that. And Google News is very well aware that search is doing that… We are definitely exploring that option as well but don’t have an exact timeline for that or even weather or not we will implement that.

Here is the video:

What I said I am unclear about is if the In The News box found in Google’s web search results, that include both news publishers and non-news publishers, will be included in this mobile ranking algorithm or not. That is unclear, but I suspect since it is not news specific (although it sounds like it is), it should be included in the mobile ranking algorithm.

About The Author

Barry Schwartz

Barry Schwartz is Search Engine Land's News Editor and owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on SEM topics.