Google Announces Algorithm Change Favoring Mobiles – Effective 21st April 2015
In the recent past, Google had announced that it would favor mobile-friendly websites by giving them preference in the search engine results pages (SERPs) over sites that are not mobile optimized. However, mobile friendly websites will soon become important for online business than ever in the past.
Ranking Signal Change
Google has taken this preference a step ahead and has issued a ranking signal change that will make the SERPs more sensitive to mobile-friendly websites in the search results. The change is in significantly due to the increasing use of mobiles and mobile internet usage. Google has reacted to this trend and has tweaked its algorithm to favor mobile friendly websites in search results. Recent reports also suggest that more than 60% of traffic now comes from mobile devices, and Google is making its SERPs more mobile friendly.
Mobile Friendliness
This far-reaching change by Google will place greater emphasis on how mobile friendly a particular website is and how well it ranks in the search results that are conducted using mobile devices. Google has mentioned that this change will affect mobile searches in all languages world wide. As a result, users will get to see relevant and superior search results that are optimized for the devices which they are using.
According to Google, this change will occur on April 21, 2015. Further, they have announced that this change will affect mobile searches conducted in all languages worldwide and is slated to have a significant impact on the search results.
How to prepare for this change
Hence, should you not prepare for 21st April 2015, when your desktop-only website could face a massive chance of a demotion, while your mobile friendly website stands a better chance? Hence, ensure the following points are taken care of to prepare for this ‘Mobile – Armageddon’.
1. if your site is already mobile friendly, there’s nothing to worry! Nevertheless, its better to fine tune your existing mobile strategy to ensure that your website does not get affected in any manner as far as possible.
2. In case your website is not mobile friendly, ensure that the mobile version of your website is active and functioning without any issues. Go responsive as far as possible. Also ensure that the Google’s mobile bots are capable of crawling your site. Finally, check that each and every page is navigable on a mobile device. This is applicable to all your websites and not just your home page.
In a nutshell, Google will significantly reward mobile-friendly websites. Beginning April 21, 2015, mobile ranking factors implemented by Google will not only label websites as mobile-friendly, but will also determine if the SERPs should display these websites higher. This update is the expansion of the mobile ranking demotion algorithm that was launched in 2013.
