In similar fashion to Google's two-step transition to mobile friendly search ranking, Microsoft has moved Bing into phase two in its efforts to promote websites that scale to mobile devices.
Around the time when Google started using "Mobile Friendly" tags to denote websites optimized for smartphones and tablets, November of last year, Microsoft unleashed its "Mobile Bots" to begin highlighting websites scaled for mobile devices.
And just as Google recently announced that it would be partial to mobile friendly websites, which has led to the so called Mobilegeddon, Microsoft just announced that it will do the same with Bing.
"Based on data from user's interaction with Bing, we have seen that mobile users are able to satisfy their information needs much faster on searches that return more mobile-friendly results," stated Shyam Jayasankar, of Bing's Mobile Relevance Team, in a blog post. "With that in mind, we will be rolling out mobile friendliness as a signal in ranking."
Microsoft is seeking to strike a balance between mobile friendliness and relevance, according to Jayasankar. Web surfers, despite their platform, can always expect to Bing to deliver the most relevant results, even if that entails including sites that aren't mobile friendly.
As for what constitutes a mobile friendly website by Microsoft's standards right now, the company lists four criteria: navigation, readability, scrolling and compatibility.
For navigation, Microsoft is looking at the usability of a website's menus and buttons and hyperlinks. As far as scrolling, Microsoft wants to ensure that horizontal scrolling is minimized because pages that requires visitors to scroll from side-to-side make it more tedious to navigate pages and hurts readability -- vertical scrolling is fine.
For readability, webpage content should require that visitor zoom in or scroll horizontally in order to read text on the pages. And as far as compatibility, all of the media on the webpage should be compatible with major mobile operating systems.
"Mobile-friendly webpages are key to satisfying on-the-go information needs, so it is important to optimize sites for an increasingly mobile user base," Jayasankar stated. "We are very interested in hearing your thoughts on mobile friendliness and any feedback you may have on our plans."
Webmasters concerned about their websites' mobile friendliness can review the best practices outlined by Microsoft in its blog post. Google has also offered mobile guide for webmasters in its post.
