Last week, Bing announced that they will be introducing a new mobile-friendly algorithm in the next couple of months.
These changes come after a similar move by Google last month when Google launched their own mobile-friendly algorithm and announced their mobile-friendly label in search results. Unlike Google, however, Bing did not give a specific date for when the algorithm will launch.
Bing Mobile-Friendly Tag
You may have noticed that Bing has started to tag search results on mobile devices as mobile-friendly.
According to the announcement, Bing has received feedback that their mobile users strongly prefer pages marked with the mobile-friendly tag. Because of this, Bing intends to use mobile friendliness as a signal in ranking in the next couple of months.
Bing Mobile-Friendly Algorithm
Bing’s new mobile-friendly algorithm will use mobile friendliness as a signal in ranking mobile search results. It is pretty similar to Google’s update which launched on April 21. However, there is a one major difference. Google’s algorithm actually penalizes webpages that are not mobile-friendly. On the other hand, Bing will still focus on relevancy. So relevant results, even if they are not mobile optimized, wont’ necessarily lose rankings.
They explained further in their announcement:
“This means that for mobile searches on Bing, you can always expect to see the most relevant results for a search query ranked higher, even if some of them are not mobile-friendly. 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. This is a fine balance and getting it right took a few iterations, but we believe we are now close.”
An exact date hasn’t been given for the rollout of this algorithm, but you can expect it within the next couple of months.
How can you prepare?
Test Your Website With Bing’s Mobile-Friendly Tool
Also like Google, Bing will be launching a tool to help webmasters test their website prior to the update.
Bing has outlined some similar criteria as Google for mobile-friendliness. For example, the text on your page should be readable without requiring zooming or scrolling. Your navigation should be large enough and spaced far enough to permit touch-based navigation.
Stay tuned for more information! We will continue to update you on the latest news on this algorithm update.
