Bing has to stay in trend with the current wave and of course following Google’s lead, this is why the tech guys at Bing announced that they will launch a mobile friendly algorithm, but this one won’t be any Mobilegeddon.
Bing officially announced that they will be introducing their very own version of the mobile friendly ranking signals in the upcoming months. The representative also explained how they a going to determine if a web page is mobile friendly or not. They also announce the adding of the mobile friendly label to sites and released the list of tools they have to help webmasters ensure their sites are mobile friendly.
Unlike Google, Bing has not specified a date for when the mobile friendly algorithm will launch. Instead, Bing is taking things slow and approaching the update at a slower rate. They explained that this is their approach in order to make sure to get webmaster feedback along the way. It is probably a better way or organizing this update in order to better communicate the changes and to reduce potential anxiety with this change.
Bing has seen a shift in the mobile space in the past year and has focused their efforts over that time in building out mobile friendly factors for Bing mobile search.
You can assume that if your site shows the mobile friendly label in the Bing results, that Bing recognizes your site as being mobile friendly and you would benefit when Bing pushes out this new algorithmic update.
Bing’s mobile friendly algorithm will be real-time, so when you go mobile friendly, as soon as Bing crawls the new mobile friendly version of your page – you will benefit from the ranking algorithm.
They are also are launching a new tool later this summer for webmasters to test their sites. The tool will help “Webmasters to analyze webpages using our mobile friendliness classifier and help them understand the results.” The tool will likely work a lot like Google’s mobile friendly testing tool by providing a yes or no answer to if your site is mobile friendly and then suggestions on how to make your site mobile friendly if the answer is no.
How Does Bing Determine If Your Page Is Mobile Friendly?
(A) Clickability of the navigation and buttons on your web site is one aspect. Are the buttons easy to press with a finger? Are they spaced out enough? Will users click on the wrong link by accident because the site isn’t designed for mobile users in mind?
(B) Can you easily read the content on the web page without having to zoom in or scroll the page left and right? The pinch and zoom desktop sites on mobile devices are not mobile friendly. You can define the font size and view settings in your HTML with viewport settings and so forth.
(C) Scrolling up and down is expected on mobile devices but scrolling left to right is not. You don’t want to have a side that you need to scroll left to view more of the content. It is not what users expect on mobile devices and is not user-friendly.
(D) Does the content load on mobile devices? Flash is an example of content that is not mobile compliant. Flash does not render on mobile devices like iOS or Android. If your site cannot render on mobile devices, it is very likely that Bing will not show it to mobile users.
(E) Don’t block your CSS, JavaScript and other external resources from Bingbot or Bingbot mobile. The bots need to crawl these resources and files to render your full-page in order to determine if it is mobile friendly. Blocking these files will prevent Bing from understanding your layout and prevent them from labeling your web pages as being mobile friendly.
