Maile Ohye at SMX today announced that they will be updating their Mobile Friendly Test to be more granular and provide insight into other on-page elements.
It is very likely these elements will be rolled into the mobile friendly algo as Google begins to add signals to the algo that will reflect issues beyond simply whether a URL is mobile friendly or not.
Mobile-friendly tool from Google is likely to be upgraded to provide more granular detail. @maileohye #smx #Keynote
— Dids Main (David) (@davidjmain) May 20, 2015
"We feel like we're just at the beginning of the stuff we could be doing for mobile." eg: understanding timeline @maileohye #SMXLondon #SMX
— Sha Menz (@ShahMenz) May 20, 2015
Right now you either get the mobile-friendly label or not, but in the future it will likely be more granular e.g. load time @maileohye #SMX
— Sha Menz (@ShahMenz) May 20, 2015
Gary Illyes has revealed that they are likely going to add both page speed and app interstitials as two future signals, something that was also reiterated by Oyhe.
This will be a huge help to webmasters who need further assistance knowing how their site performs for mobile users. While whether a URL is mobile friendly or not provides webmasters with details about what makes an individual page not mobile friendly, page speed is another issue, especially since Google calculates this on their end, not on the end of a user. And there is already some debate about what speed webmasters should strive to hit, so hopefully this is something that could be included too.
We don’t yet know when Google might add these additional signals – or any other signals – into the mobile friendly algo, but webmasters should definitely start thinking about working on their page speeds for mobile traffic and rethink those app interstitials.
Jennifer Slegg
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