In an effort to enhance the search experience of smartphone users and remedy their difficulties, Google has recently announced that it will bring in some serious changes to its ranking policies and strategies. The measures might end up de-ranking those sites that are misconfigured for smartphone users. The underline is that the efforts on part of the webmasters to redesign sites to be able to flawlessly display on all devices including smartphones will be duly rewarded. To start with, it is important to note that the following aspects will be detrimental to websites.

Detrimental factors

• Videos unplayable especially made using FLASH are going to push your site further down the abyss.
• Redirects render landing on your site complicated. Google says getting the redirects wrong is a valid reason to de-rank a site.
• ‘Smartphone-only 404’s that might occur when a smartphone user happens to visit a webpage made for desktop users if you have not used the proper setups.
• Your app promos that might create problems for Google Indexing shall force penalization of your site.
• Attempt to cater to the needs of both smartphone users and desktop users with irrelevant cross-linking.
• Slow loading pages: (Google expects the pages to load in about a second).
• The changing ranking strategies adopted by Google

Depending on the situations from time to time and the changing needs of visitors, Google is shifting its focus. For instance, relevance is no longer Google’s obsession. The prime concern to rank a page first is its mechanical compliance and then relevance. The underlying reason is that when the customer is looking for a quality product, affordable pricing and sweet deals they may not give much importance to what you have used in the making of your website.

While most online companies share these problems, many of them in fact do not know anything about all this. Google really wants webmasters to adopt industry best practices of employing a responsive web design. This will mean you will be at an advantageous position by serving the same HTML across all devices and making use of CSS media queries to guide your choice of the rendering on each kind of device.

The alarm signal to wake Up

Google’s new guidelines land as an ultimatum. They say that the conventional HTML design employed over the past decade has several disadvantages by featuring some obsolete elements with regard to search engine ranking capabilities. The indication is that you should really work fast to redesign your site to load faster and respond equally good to all devices. If this does not happen, you should not be surprised to see your site pushed down the bottom line to be buried one fine day.

In fact, this information is not new. Experts have been warning webmasters and site owners in this connection for the past six months or little more than that. Therefore, wake up and make your website compatible on all devices including desktops, laptops, iPads, notepads, iPhones, and Android devices and you are done.