Google’s New Mobile-Friendly URL Algorithm | Varn

Insights

8 May 2015

Google’s New Mobile-Friendly URL Algorithm: Are You Aware Of The Changes?

As we have stated previously on this blog – if you don’t want your ranking ultimately penalised then it’s now a ‘must’ that you have optimised your website for mobile devices.

Beyond this, there is another change by Google that is aimed at making the user experience better for people accessing websites on their smart phones and tablets. The change was announced on the Google Webmaster blog on 16 April and is concerned with the URLs and making them neatly and more informatively presented in search results.

Providing A Reflection Of Structure

A well-structured URL will demonstrate or point toward what the page content is and how the page fits into the website. The new algorithm now changes the way that URLs are displayed in the search results so they better mirror the websites, using the real-world name of the website as opposed to the domain name, whilst also revealing details of the structure of the site with a ‘breadcrumb’ trail of relevant site information in the green line beneath the main link. A breadcrumb trail looks like this ‘Varn > About’, as opposed to ‘www.varnmedia.co.uk/about/’

The changes are rolling out slowly and will only affect mobile results. Whilst the breadcrumbs approach is rolling out worldwide, the site name changes are only relevant in the US for now.

For businesses this means that there is more opportunity to reinforce your brand through your URL. This is in line with Google’s continued effort to discriminate against fake or misleading websites too.

Test Your Website

This new change should mean that users will be able to locate what they are looking for much faster on mobile devices.

If you want to see how your site name appears you can check here: https://developers.google.com/structured-data/testing-tool/

If you want to make sure your website is fully optimised for mobile devices please contact the team at Varn.

Article by: Tom, CEO of Varn More articles by Tom

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