Microsoft is taking a page out of Google's book with an announcement Thursday that it plans to start prioritizing mobile-friendly sites in Bing search results

The upcoming changes, expected to begin rolling out in the "coming months," will indeed improve the ranking of mobile-friendly webpages, but Microsoft said its main goal is to bring you the most relevant results for your searches, regardless of whether that page is set up to work well on your mobile device or not. As a result, webpages that are "highly relevant" to a given query that are not yet mobile-friendly will not necessarily get penalized.

"This means that for mobile searches on Bing, you can always expect to see the most relevant results for a search query ranked higher, even if some of them are not mobile-friendly," Bing's Shyam Jayasankar wrote in a blog post. "This is a fine balance and getting it right took a few iterations, but we believe we are now close."

The upcoming changes come after Microsoft recently started tagging certain search results as "mobile-friendly," signaling to users that they shouldn't have to zoom or pinch the site to read it on their mobile device. Microsoft said that it has received "great feedback" from this change, and users "strongly prefer" pages marked with the mobile-friendly tag.

"Based on data from user's interaction with Bing, we have seen that mobile users are able to satisfy their information needs much faster on searches that return more mobile-friendly results," Jayasankar wrote.

Google caused quite a stir last month when it updated its algorithm to give preference to mobile-friendly sites for smartphone or tablet queries — a move some dubbed "mobilegeddon." The change means websites not currently optimized for variously sized mobile devices will be buried under an avalanche of results, while mobile-friendly sites rocket to the top.

To ease the transition on Bing, Microsoft is planning to release tool in the next few weeks that will allow webmasters to analyze the Web-friendliness of their site. This tool should help webmasters identify and fix areas of their site that "suffer from mobile friendliness issues."