Bing has announced that they are launching their own mobile friendly algorithm for Bing searches coming from mobile devices.
Last month, Google began giving a boost to mobile friendly web pages in their own search results for searches done from a mobile device. So it’s not surprising that Bing is following the lead to include their own.
Bing includes specific examples showing the types of issues on websites that are not mobile friendly. They include:
- Navigation too close together for touch-based navigation.
- Readability that does not require zooming or side scrolling to see all portions of the page.
- No side-scrolling required to see content, only vertical scrolling permitted.
- Compatibility for mobile devices, such as flash or videos that cannot be played while on a mobile device.
Like Google, you do also need to ensure that you have unblocked resources, including CSS and JavaScript, for Bing bot to crawl properly.
They do not appear to have their own mobile friendly to tool for webmasters to easily check and see if their web pages are mobile friendly or not in Bing’s eyes. However, if webmasters have the mobile friendly tag in Google, it’s very likely the same will apply to Bing
You can also search for your sites or individual webpages in Bing from a mobile device to see if you do have the mobile friendly tag or not. The implementation of the tag in the Bing search results is virtually identical to Google’s.
Bing is also exploring the possibility of including future mobile friendly signals into their version of the mobile friendly algorithm, similarly to how Google has been hinting the same. But they mention pop-ups specifically as being one of the factors they are considering while Google seems to have page speed and app interstitials targeted first.
It also isn’t clear whether Yahoo’s search results will be affected. Since Bing provides Yahoo with their search results, it would make sense it would. However, Bing did not state whether this would be true or not.
Bing hasn’t announced the dates for when webmasters can expect the mobile friendly algorithm to start taking effect in their search results, but they do say it will be “in the coming months.”
Jennifer Slegg
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