Bing is following Google’s footsteps and changing its search algorithm. The Microsoft owned search engine is tweaking Bing’s algorithm to favor mobile sites higher than desktop-only counterparts when searching on a phone.
Bing plans to determine a site’s mobile-friendliness based on several factors like navigation, readability, scrolling, and compatibility. Mobile-friendly sites should display content that is well spaced out and navigable by touch. Bing stated how it determines which webpages to label as “Mobile-friendly.” The label lets users skim through mobile search results and quickly see which ones will load quickly and display properly. Unsurprisingly, Microsoft found visitors “strongly prefer” pages marked with the mobile-friendly tag as they can find the information they seek much faster.
“While the changes will improve ranking for mobile-friendly pages, webpages that are highly relevant to the given query that are not yet mobile-friendly will not get penalized. We have also been working on a tool that will allow Webmasters to analyze webpages using our mobile friendliness classifier and help them understand the results. This tool will become available in a few weeks from now and help Webmasters find and fix areas of their site that suffer from mobile friendliness issues.”
Bing posted in a company blog.
Bing expects to begin rolling out its search ranking changes “in the coming months.”