Google’s Mobile Friendly Algorithm Update – Greater Impact than Previously Estimated

Over the past few weeks, small and large businesses have been given a clear warning from Google – if your website has a poor mobile experience, then your search rankings could be affected. Mobilegeddon kicks in today.

Google’s latest update to their search algorithm which determines where your business ranks for certain terms, means if you have a website which is only optimised for desktop computers and doesn’t work well on mobile devices, then you’re about to be on the wrong side of the new change and you may lose significant amounts of organic search traffic.

This update is going to drastically affect how search results are presented on mobile devices, and then have a major effect on where mobile users browse, shop and spend their time online. It was confirmed at SMX Munich this year when Zineb Ait Bahajji of Google’s Webmaster Trends team stated that the mobile friendly algorithm will have a greater impact than Panda or Penguin (source: Search engine journal)

Are you prepared for Mobilegeddon? Search Engine Journal has a comprehensive guide on getting your small business ready for Google’s mobile friendly update. Here’s some information from their website, for more details I suggest you check it out.

Does Your Site Even Have Major Issues to Fix?

The first step in this process is obviously to determine if your site is going to actually be at risk with this update. Google has offered webmasters a number of tools to help determine how “mobile friendly” their sites are:

• The mobile friendliness tool, which gives you a mobile friendly or unfriendly thumbs up or thumbs down as well as a quick screenshot of your site as Google sees it, and specific recommendations for areas to fix if you’re “mobile unfriendly”.

• Google’s Page Speed Insights tool which gives you a sense of your site’s mobile page speed and also offers recommendations on things to fix. Note the two tools report differently, with the mobile friendliness tool looking at the page the way Googlebot would, and the PageSpeed Insights tool fetches a page as a user would.

• When logged into Webmaster Tools you can navigate to the Mobile Usability Report and see specific issues WMT is showing with specific pages there, as well. Google is also sending out notifications through Webmaster Tools for sites that won’t meet the mobile friendliness requirements, which you might find under your messages in Webmaster Tools if you haven’t seen the notification already (assuming your site isn’t mobile friendly).

So if your site is mobile friendly and loads really quickly on mobile devices, like the responsive website design we’ve designed and developed for Coffeebird.com.au or Attachesoftware.com sp2kinetics.com.au Beyondbank.com.au then you can stop reading this article and get some other work done, with a smug smile that you’re ahead of about 50% of the TOP ASX200 websites. (source: ROI).

If you’ve recently had your ‘responsive’ website designed and built by Creative Order, you can rest easy. If not, get in contact as we have the right tools to get your website ‘mobilegeddon ready’.