Microsoft’s search engine Bing announced yesterday that it is taking active steps to improve the rankings of mobile-responsive pages.
With the news coming just a month after Google made an algorithmic change to penalise websites that could not be easily accessed from handheld devices, which some in the search engine optimisation (SEO) industry dubbed ‘mobilegeddon’, it seems its rival is taking note.
Recent Google research has also revealed that more online searches are now taking place through smartphones and tablets than on desktop PCs, so tapping into this market could help Microsoft carve out a better position within the search market.
However, according to TechCruch, the steps that Bing is taking appear to be much less severe than those of its larger competitor. For one, it has begun to label a number of the links found within its search engine results pages (SERPs) as “Mobile-friendly”, so that users are able to choose for themselves whether they would want to click on the site.
Also, while Google has chosen the path of actively punishing websites that are not set up for traffic coming in from handheld devices, Bing will reportedly only provide better support to mobile-responsive sites in its SERPs.
As such, it is still possible for pages that are not mobile friendly to rank better than those that are, but they must appear to Bing to be of higher relevance to the user.
According to a report from Search Engine Land last month, Bing now commands one-fifth of the search market over in the US, with the shares held by Yahoo and Google down slightly as a result.