Yesterday we asked how do we know if our pages on our web site will benefit from the mobile friendly algorithm. If the mobile usability reports show you have issues but the mobile testing tool give you the all clear, Google says you should be fine. In fact, they said what I thought they would say, if your site has the mobile-friendly label then you know you will get the mobile-friendly ranking benefit.
Mary from the Google Webmaster team answered this in a Google+ hangout yesterday in two points:
3:55 into the video she said:
Take out your phone, look up your web site. See if there is a gray mobile friendly label in your description snippet. If it is in the search results, if you see it, that means that Google understands that your site is mobile friendly and if you don’t see it then we don’t see that your site is mobile friendly or your is not mobile friendly.
22:10 into the video she said:
Does the "mobile-friendly" label tell me that I'm currently receiving the benefit or are those two things unrelated?Basically, those are related. So if you have the mobile-friendly label in the search results, which is the same as showing up as mobile friendly, if you use our mobile friendly testing tool, then your site will be considered mobile friendly in our ranking change. Keep in mind that it is on a per page basis.
32:05: in the video, Google also said that the mobile usability report is delayed based on crawling:
The mobile friendly test and mobile usability report should give you the same result. They should match up. What can be the difference is, let’s say you fixed your site, the mobile usability report will be last detected date. It might not be the most updated information. So if you did change your site and you want to see if we detected it, run it through the mobile friendly test. The mobile usability report will catch up when it crawls.They should match up but in general the difference is normally due to a timeline of the crawl.
So there you have it, your best bet is to look at the mobile friendly label in the search results and mobile testing tool and of course, keep an eye on the mobile usability report.
Forum discussion at Google+.
