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For those wondering about the title “Mobile Friendly or GTFO (Go To Farthest Outskirts),” Google has been pushing for mobile friendly sites for quite some time now (3-4 years). They’ve finally started to push sites that are not mobile friendly out of the mobile search results with their latest algorithm update. If you’re just learning about all of this, here’s quick summary of what you need to know.
Top 5 Mobile Friendly Questions:
Question: When is Google releasing the mobile-friendly algorithm?
Answer: It already happened, on April 21, 2015.
Question: What is this algorithmic update, and who will it impact?
Answer: This update will impact only mobile searchers, and it will give a ranking boost to mobile-friendly pages in Google’s mobile search results only.
Question: Will it impact desktop searchers? Will my desktop rankings drop?
Answer: No. According to Google, it will only impact mobile searchers, and will have no impact on your desktop rankings.
Question: Will it impact tablet searchers?
Answer: No, this only impacts searches done on mobile smartphone devices, not tablets.
Question: How do I know if my site is mobile friendly?
Answer: We recommend using the Google Webmaster Mobile Friendly Testing Tool. If you just made a change, please note that results can sometimes be delayed.
Important Fact: The mobile friendly algorithm works on a page-by-page basis. This point means that even if your whole site isn’t mobile friendly, you can see positive gains for the pages that are.
Check out the full Search Engine Land article: “Are You Ready Q&A List.”
Here’s what we’ve seen since the algorithm change. The roll out has been slow. There has definitely been movement in the mobile rankings, however it’s not too late to make the necessary changes. If your site isn’t mobile friendly today, we recommend taking the steps to make it mobile friendly. Even a quick patch fix with software like Dudamobile is a good route until you can make the site “responsive,” which is the best solution for the long term.
The long-term impact is that Google will continue to constantly push sites to become mobile friendly. Why are they doing this? Because they want to provide the best search experience for their users, and their users are searching with mobile devices more and more – in fact, as of May 2015, Google confirmed that more searches happen on mobile than desktop nowadays. If you weren’t prepared and are just beginning, then this definitely needs to become a priority for your organization, or you will lose out on the huge market share of mobile searchers.
You might say to yourself “I don’t get a whole lot of traffic to my site. I don’t have to worry about this.” Well, in the near future, if you’re not mobile friendly, that’s going to become a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you’re not mobile friendly, then you’ll be right – you don’t receive much of that traffic.
