Google Update
They called it Mobilegeddon. This April 21st, Google announced that they would be expanding their use of mobile -friendliness as a raking signal. This change will affect mobile searches in all languages worldwide and will have a significant impact on their search results. What this means literally is that Google is doing a major update of their search algorithm, and will now, for the first time, boost the rankings of mobile-friendly pages.
What “Mobile friendly” means is pages that are legible and usable on mobile devices, across the globe. You know when you’re trying to load a webpage on your mobile device, but the format of that website doesn’t seem to be compatible with your phone and you can’t select any of the options or the page loads all lop-sided and weird? That’s when a page isn’t mobile friendly, and this update means that pages like that will rank lower on Google mobile searches, so you have less chance of hitting them.
This update from Google has been much anticipated, but the search engine/world power hasn’t been especially forthcoming with details. What we do know for sure is that this update will have absolutely no effect on searched from tablets or desktops. What is also certain is that this is going to be a page-level rankings boost, not a site-level one. This means that say if ten of the fifteen pages on your website are mobile friendly, they will receive a positive boost, but the ranking of the non-mobile friendly pages on the site will not be positively impacted.
This update is a very important turning point for Google. The decision to incorporate mobile-friendliness into Google’s page rankings system indicates the change in trend that is being observed in terms of what devices we use to browse the web. This in turn confirms the fact that Google is constructing a dedicated mobile index, which will specifically index mobile pages.
What can you or your business take from this announcement? The final word from this announcement is that it is now more important than ever for your website to be mobile-friendly, as not being so runs the risk that your internet presence will suffer.
