Google has been advising websites to prepare for mobile users for years. Websites that have ignored those warnings will start to feel the consequences now. Starting on 21 April, sites that are not mobile-friendly will see a fall in their mobile traffic, writes Rory MccGwire.
In the past, Google updates have been designed to weed out websites that tried to cheat. The Panda update punished low quality web content that was only created to boost a site’s ranking. The Penguin update then targeted ‘spammy links’ and other deceptions. As a result, some high profile commercial websites suddenly found that they had received Google penalties and their search rankings plummeted overnight.
The latest update to the Google search engine algorithm that is scheduled to “start from 21 April” is different. This time, Google has given advance notice of the changes.
Although Google has not spelt out any details, it is widely believed that only web traffic from mobile phones and tablets will be affected. So a website that ranks well for searches using a PC or laptop should continue to rank well for those searches.
But for many websites, mobile searches now account for more than half of traffic. If any pages do not pass Google's mobile-friendly test, it will downgrade the search rankings of those pages for that type of traffic.
Some websites already have a separate mobile site. Others websites have been built from the ground up using ‘responsive design’; these display the website in the best way possible for each different screen size. Along with mobile apps, these types of websites will see their rankings improve for mobile searches.
“You can tell if a website is not mobile-friendly by doing the pinch test”, explains Charles Christian, editor of Legal IT Insider, a technology website for law firms. “Simply view your website using a smartphone. If you need to pinch and stretch the text in order to make it readable, it is not mobile-friendly.
“Deciding if a website is mobile-friendly enough to keep Google happy is a bit more complicated,” he continues. “So Google has provided some helpful tools and tips including a mobile-friendly test that you can apply to every different type of page on your website. Just go to https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/mobile-friendly/.”