Being mobile-friendlyhas its rewards. Google announced that starting this week itsmobile searches will label sites as mobile-friendly, and also useit as a determining factor in ranking results.

“Users will find it easier to get relevant, high quality searchresults that are optimized for their devices,” Google emphasized inits announcement. “By boosting the ranking of mobile-friendly pageson mobile search results, searchers can more easily findhigh-quality and relevant results where text is readable withouttapping or zooming, tap targets are spaced appropriately, and thepage avoids unplayable content or horizontal scrolling.”

The update affects only search rankings on mobile devices andsearch results in all languages globally, and applies to individualpages, not entire websites. Google also said the new process onlywill work for signed-in users who have the app installed on theirmobile devices, which means only Android apps.

Google explained that while the mobile-friendly change isimportant, it still uses a variety of signals to rank searchresults. The intent of the search query is still a very strongsignal, so even if a page with high quality content is notmobile-friendly, it could still rank high if it has great contentfor the query.

Google said it is making these changes to offer a better mobileexperience for searchers and give people what they want. As mobileinternet access grows, and mobile banking competition intensifies, the formula used todetermine page rank must adapt to accommodate these usagepatterns.

In fact, according to Pew Research Center, nearly two-thirds ofAmericans own a smartphone. Additionally, 19% of Americans rely tosome degree on a smartphone for accessing online services andinformation and for staying connected to the world, either becausethey lack broadband at home or have few options for online accessother than their cell phone.

According to a recent study, as reported by Techcrunch.com,mobile device access has tipped the scales over desktop usage: morethan 60% of digital consumption is through a smart phone, tablet,etc.

Google provides a Mobile-Friendly Test to check pages or thestatus of an entire site through the Mobile Usability report inWebmaster Tools. If a site's pages aren't mobile-friendly, theremay be a significant decrease in mobile traffic from Google Search.But once a site becomes mobile-friendly, it will automaticallyre-process (i.e., crawl and index) the pages.

“You can also expedite the process by using Fetch as Google withSubmit to Index, and then your pages can be treated asmobile-friendly in ranking,” Google also said.