If you haven’t made a priority of making your website mobile friendly, you might want to start thinking about changing that.
It could cost you your ranking on Google. (Cue the horror film screams.)
What Happened
In mid-April, Google announced that they were developing a new mobile-friendly ranking algorithm. The idea was that mobile-friendly sites would, in theory, appear higher in search engine results when users were conducting their searches on a mobile phone.
To a lot of people, this wasn’t just some small change: this was “Mobilegeddon”. Businesses began to panic about the mobile-friendliness of their websites (what took you so long?), with many opting to expedite the process before the algorithm change took effect.
On April 21st, the world of SEO held its collective breath as it waited to see Mobilegeddon unfold. It wasn’t unlike the moment the clock struck midnight on December 31, 1999. And just as our wild fears of the Y2K bug were all for nothing, it turns out that the fuss behind Mobilegeddon may have been a little bit excessive.
For now, at least.
What Could Happen
It turned out that the change in the algorithm didn’t have as severe an impact as many had expected. It took a week to fully roll out, but even after that week, the changes weren’t as drastic as anticipated.
This is thought to be generally attributable to a few factors.
First, and perhaps most importantly, the update was implemented, but not all websites have been reindexed. As these websites’ scores become updated, it could potentially affect the rankings in mobile search. (Read more here.)
Second, the fact that many companies decided to take action on making their website mobile friendly prior to the launch of the update could have lessened the impact of the update. In theory, the update is supposed to make mobile friendly sites appear higher than non-mobile friendly sites in mobile searches; if the site is, indeed, mobile friendly, then it should remain roughly where it is in desktop searches, assuming competing sites have taken similar action.
Third, many note that the update was said to be one factor that affects search engine results. That doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s the only factor, or the “be all or end all” factor. Other factors could take priority in the ranking, making the effects not as noticeable as people expected.
Time will tell how much impact this change has really caused, but for now, it’s safe to say that the so called “Mobilegeddon” was an overreaction.
What Should I Do?
Algorithm update or not, you really should have a mobile friendly website. If your site looks bad on mobile devices, you’re going to lose out on the audience that is visiting you from those sources—and you probably know that more and more people are using mobile devices to do their internet searches.
To find out whether Google considers your website to be mobile-friendly or not, just enter the web address into this site.
You want it to say “Awesome! This page is mobile friendly” after you complete your analysis. If it doesn’t say that, you have some work to do.
Cloud9 Marketing can help you bring your website up to mobile-friendly standards, preventing you from losing out on potential business and on your mobile search engine results ranking. Contact us, and we’ll set up a plan for
