Google’s Mobile Search Results Soon to Show Site Name
Google is constantly making changes to its search result pages in order to improve the efficacy and intelligence of its algorithms. One of the more recent changes they have implemented is meant to change the way mobile search results are shown. In addition to providing preferred placement to mobile-friendly sites, they announced on April 17th 2016, their plan to change the domain name with the company or websites real name for mobile searches. With so many consumers using mobile devices for searching, it’s only natural that Google would want to cater to this rapidly expanding trend.
URL Domain Names May Be No More
Google will be replacing the URL domain names of pages with the real name of company or website to more effectively display what website is being viewed on the mobile phone. Before the change, mobile searches would often result in results that listed partial URL’s that did not identify to the user what website they would be clicking through to. Having the site name properly displayed in the search results clearly tells searchers what company or website they are visiting before the click. By utilizing structured data format webmasters can control what “website names” and “breadcrumbs” are displayed in their mobile search results. Following some simple guidelines Google has outlined (be reasonably similar to your domain name, be a natural name used to refer to the site, such as “Infront Webworks,” rather than “Infront Webworks, Inc.”, be unique to your site—not used by some other site, not be a misleading description of your site) in their “Developers Blog” you can also provide more than one possible name for your site, and let Google Search algorithms choose between them.
In order for Google to recognize your markup as a site name, make sure you do the following:
•Use schema.org vocabulary in JSON-LD, RDFa, or microdata format
•Publish markup on your official website homepage
•Do not block pages with markup using the Robots Exclusion Protocol
•Include a WebSite item in your markup using the relevant properties:
- ◦url = the URL of your official website (required)
- name = the preferred name of your website (required)
- ◦alternateName = an alternate name you want Google to consider (optional)
The following JSON-LD example specifies a site name and can be inserted in the head or body of your code.
<script type=”application/ld+json”>
{ “@context” : “http://schema.org”,
“@type” : “WebSite”,
“name” : “Infront Webworks”,
“alternateName” : “Infront”,
“url” : “https://www.infront.com”
}
</script>
An example of a microdata format for our Infront Webworks Website would be.
<head itemscope itemtype=”http://schema.org/WebSite”>
<title itemprop=’name’>Infront Webworks</title>
<link rel=”canonical” href=”https://www.infront.com/” itemprop=”url”>
If you copy this markup, make sure to replace the values of the url, name, and alternateName properties with your own values before inserting the code into your website’s home page.
Testing Your Mobile Search Results Markup
To verify that your markup is well-formed and can be processed by Google, Google has a “Structured Data Testing Tool” to paste the HTML source (or script code), or to fetch the URL of the page being tested into the Google Structured Data Testing Tool. The validator will confirm compliance, or indicate errors such as incorrect syntax.
Once markup is updated and validated you can request google recrawl your pages.
Mobile-Friendly Sites Are a Necessity
The other major change that Google has implemented is a heavy favoring of mobile-optimized websites. In order to optimize your site for mobile, look to responsive design. Responsive design dynamically sizes your site and automatically adjusts it to fit mobile device resolutions for Smartphones and tablets. Although there are other options, the first step to determining your compliance for Google’s mobile friendly update is to determine whether your website is currently compliant, Google’s “mobile friendly test” will tell you exactly.
With the consistent steady growth of mobile website users, making regular steps to improve your mobile presence will ensure you maintain that mobile marketshare.
If you need professional SEO services for your website, please give us a call at (719) 577-4404. We are located in beautiful Colorado Springs, Colorado, but manage clients across the United States.
Allan Todd is CEO of Pagecafe Digital Marketing. In 2022, Allan teamed up with Infront Webworks to provide digital marketing, website design, content marketing, SEO and strategy and solutions to local businesses. Allan lives in Colorado Springs.