Microsoft makes mobile-friendly sites more prominent in Bing

Microsoft wants to make Bing more suitable for mobile visitors in the coming months. That’s why the company is working on ways to make mobile more prominent in its search engine. One of these is showing a separate ‘mobile tag’ in the search results.

Bing search behavior figures show that mobile users are more likely to be satisfied with mobile sites than with desktop-only sites. That is why the tech giant thinks it makes sense to make mobile sites more prominent in the results, including with a separate tag. Windows Phone users in particular make frequent use of Bing because it is the operating system’s default search engine.

In a blog post, Microsoft explains how it wants to show mobile results better later. In short, Bing’s algorithm takes into account mobile sites, but doesn’t penalize sites that only offer a desktop view. According to Microsoft, this will eventually create a good balance between relevance and ‘mobile friendliness’.

According to Microsoft, several factors determine when a website can be characterized as mobile-friendly. This concerns, among other things, the navigation, which is scalable, for example, and the readability of the web pages. It must also be easy to scroll and the website must be compatible with multiple mobile devices.

Microsoft will roll out the ‘mobile tag’ – the text mobile-friendly for a search result – within a few months. The iteration follows after the company previously gave the image finder a major update. Since then, more information has been shown about the image accompanying the respective result.