Bing Joins Goolge In Enforcing The Mobile Friendliness Rule But How Do Search Engines Rank?

Just weeks after Google announced that it was going to start give sites with obile friendliness priority in its search, Microsoft is poised to do the same using its Bing platform.

This was made known in a blog post where it said it would be favouring mobile friendly sites in order to accommodate the increases use of mobile search.

Microsoft is adjusting how it ranks Bing search results for mobile users, prioritizing sites that display better on smaller screens to accommodate the increased use of mobile search. In the post, Microsoft listed four main factors that would eventually determine if your site would be prioritised or not. First of which is navigation which implies that “the menus, buttons and links on the page should be large enough and spaced well apart to aid touch-based navigation. In the example below, you can see the large, easy-to-tap and distinct navigational elements on the mobile-friendly page. In contrast, the page on the right has hyperlinks that are too close to each other and could be prone to accidental clicks from mobile users.”

There’s also readability which has to do with font size without the reader having to zoom. The third one is scrolling which mean the content of the web-page should fit within the device width and lastly we have compatibility. Pages with flash content do not work well with iOS.

A research carried out by smart insights, 80% of internet users now own a smartphone so you can understand why need by internet search giants to prioritise search originating from mobile. With the rise of wearables, you can be sure that this figure is set to rise over the coming years as you can see from the chart above.

In terms of the internet search market, Google still leads. According to a report by StatCounter, Bing controls about 6% of the US search market while Google controls about 83% with Yahoo having a 10% shares as at August 2014.

In technologically advanced countries in Africa like Nigeria where Google search engine recorded a 93% control last year, the story is pretty consistent across board. In Egypt for instance, it was 96% for Google against Yahoo’s 2.3% last year.

When it comes to browsers, Google still leads. Google accounts for about 67% of searches from US devices while the Microsoft comes a distant second at 20% and Yahoo about 10%.