Today is the day which is being dubbed as Mobilegeddon with Google’s mobile friendly algorithm being launched.
The algorithm aims to boost mobile-friendly pages in Google’s mobile search results (it will not impact desktop searches).
Image Credit: Google’s mobile friendly launch blog post
To quickly determine if your web pages are “mobile friendly”, Google has released the Mobile Friendly Testing Tool
The algorithm operates on a page by page basis, so if your website isn’t completely mobile friendly but some pages are, they could still benefit from the update. There are also no different grades of “mobile friendliness” – a page either is mobile friendly or not!
While the algorithm has been launched today, Google representatives have confirmed that it will take a few weeks for it be fully rolled out, so it could take a few days to weeks to see how your website’s ranking in mobile search have been impacted. The overall impact of this algorithm won’t become clear for some time, however it is suggested that it will be more impactful than both the Panda and Penguin updates.
It’s worth noting though that while the mobile-friendly change is important, Google still uses a variety of signals to rank search results, such as the intent of the search query so if a page with high quality content is not mobile-friendly, it could still rank high if it is relevant to the query.
Unlike some of the other Google updates, if you make changes to make your website mobile friendly, Google will automatically re-process (i.e., crawl and index) your pages and mark them as mobile friendly
Talk to us!
If you are concerned by this update, or would like to talk to one of the team about making your website mobile friendly, please get in touch!