On April 21, 2015, Google will change it’s algorithm. All sites that are mobile-friendly will become more available on search engines. Sites that aren’t will be penalized and could lose major business.
Mobile-friendly web sites will get a significant boost in web traffic in Google listings on mobile phones . They will climb the search engine ranks over non-mobile pages that contain similar information.
Whereas, sites that are not mobile-friendly will be penalized and possibly dropped from Google results on mobile devices.
There are five things to keep in mind about this update:
1) Mobile search results only: It will only impact results shown on Google for mobile queries.
2) All language update: This is a global roll-out. Those that manage pages across geographies that cover multiple languages should know about this.
3) Individual pages: Pages are being evaluated on a case by case basis. So if 10 pages on a site are mobile friendly and the rest of the site is not. Those pages will rank in the mobile results and the rest may not.
4) This is one factor on how Google will rank a mobile page result: The update raises the importance of a mobile-friendly experience, but it is no the only not the only factor that Google is considering when ranking a page.
5) Good content can still rank. If the content on a non-mobile friendly page is considered the most relevant for the search by a user it will still rank high for the moment but that may change in the future.
Is your website mobile-friendly?
It’s easy to find out if your website is mobile-friendly by using Google’s Mobile-Friendly test. Just click on the link to the left. It will take you to a page where you can enter your URL. Google will analyze your website and let you know where you are at.
Here’s the message you are looking for:
If you don’t get the: “Awesome! This page is mobile-friendly” your web site needs some quick work to get mobile-friendly.
And there are no short cuts, the only compatible way to comply with the Google change is to move your current site content into a mobile-friendly template.
There are four triage solutions that could buy you some time while you put together resources and find someone to rebuild your site. But this are only short-term solutions. You could:
- Install a mobile-friendly site plugin. This is not ideal, but if it takes you from no mobile functionality to some functionality while you implement a more robust solution its not a bad short cut. Your webmaster should be able to do this in a few hours.
- Build a mobile solution that looks for mobile devices and redirects to a subset of mobile friendly pages for high page rank content (pages that rank well on Google). This should include your homepage and contact pages. This again is better than nothing and will not prevent a loss of SEO ranking completely. Google recommends against it but says its not as bad a no mobile strategy. This would buy some more time likely.
- To properly resolve this need a “responsive” redesign that will serve the pages to different devices using CSS (Cascading Style Sheet) technology. This takes the content of the page and formats it for the screen it will be displayed on.
If you need help figuring out what to do you can ask the experts at Cyberwalker Digital. We’ll give you free advice and guide you to resources that can help you. Our team of web site strategists and designer understand the changes you are facing and can develop a strategy that supports your SEO efforts
Click the button below to send provide us with your url that’s being affected by Google’s algorithm change and any questions you have. We will contact you within 24 hours (on a business day) with actionable solutions. CLICK THE BUTTON BELOW:
