Bing announced they are introducing their own version of mobile friendly search ranking algorithms. Bing has explained their update will not replicate the Google mobilegeddon update, but will have some similar reasons as to what makes a mobile friendly website.

Bing is taking a slower approach than Google in making this update and have not released a date as to when the update will go live. The slower approach is to make sure to get feedback along the way. Bing explains the reasoning for this is to better communicate the changes, over time, before it happens, to reduce potential anxiety with the change.

Bing has released an update that tells you if a website is Mobile-friendly. Here is a picture showing the mobile results.

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It’s safe to say if your site shows the mobile friendly label that Bing recognizes your website as being a mobile friendly website and once they launch their algorithmic update your website will benefit from it.

It seems the new Bing update will be similar to the Google’s Mobilegeddon that was launched on April 21st, 2015. Bing released information a year ago that explained how things are transforming to be more mobile friendly and some of the things they are looking into to figure out what makes a good mobile website.

The difference between the Bing and Google update is that Bing says relevancy will always trump mobile friendly. So the sites that are not mobile friendly but are more relevant to the search topic will most likely still rank pretty well and rank above a mobile friendly site that is not as relevant. Bing is aiming for a more “balanced” algorithm between relevancy and mobile friendly search results.

What’s great about the way Bing is going about this is they tell you if the site is mobile friendly before you click on it. This is great because it gives you the option to decide for yourself if you want to view a website even if it is not mobile friendly.

Bing is planning to release a tool this summer that will allow you to test your website and see if it is mobile friendly. The tool will help “webmasters analyze webpages using our mobile friendliness classifier and help them understand the results.” The tool will most likely work the same way Google’s mobile friendly testing tool works. Displaying a yes or no for mobile friendliness and then suggestions on how to make it mobile friendly if it says your website is not.

How does Bing determine if your page is mobile friendly? (Search Engine Land)

(A) Clickability of the navigation and buttons on your web site is one aspect. Are the buttons easy to press with a finger? Are they spaced out enough? Will users click on the wrong link by accident because the site isn’t designed for mobile users in mind?

(B) Can you easily read the content on the web page without having to zoom in or scroll the page left and right? The pinch and zoom desktop sites on mobile devices are not mobile friendly. You can define the font size and view settings in your HTML with viewport settings and so forth.

(C) Scrolling up and down is expected on mobile devices but scrolling left to right is not. You don’t want to have a side that you need to scroll left to view more of the content. It is not what users expect on mobile devices and is not user friendly.

(D) Does the content load on mobile devices? Flash is an example of content that is not mobile compliant. Flash does not render on mobile devices like iOS or Android. If your site cannot render on mobile devices, it is very likely that Bing will not show it to mobile users.

(E) Don’t block your CSS, JavaScript and other external resources from Bingbot or Bingbot mobile. The bots need to crawl these resources and files to render your full page in order to determine if it is mobile friendly. Blocking these files will prevent Bing from understanding your layout and prevent them from labeling your web pages as being mobile friendly.

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