On website rankings that is…
Specifically on non-mobile friendly websites. Significantly dropping their rankings in organic search or completely removing them if they are were not mobile friendly for the end user.
Some people are calling it Mobilegeddon, because it is one of the biggest updates to Google’s Algorithm since the rollout of Penguin and Panda, that had website owners up in arms (and crying) about the huge loss in traffic, as their rankings plummeted.
So what is Mobilegeddon and how does it affect you and I?
Google is always looking to improve the quality of the internet, so naturally as mobile internet usage aggressively climbs (At the time of writing 75.4% of Australian’s use the internet from their phone daily), Google wants to ensure that any website that is ranking in the top 10 positions is providing the best user experience.
Now, we have all experienced:
- The website that takes forever to load on a mobile phone and hit the back button.
- The website that is impossible to click on the navigation, only to leave frustrated, never to return.
- And we have all experienced the website that you can’t click the phone number to call (mostly likely to go to a competitor because it’s too hard to write down the number then type it again). So why does Google care so much about the quality of a mobile site? We all know that Google makes it money by the advertising at the top and on the side when you type in a search on their home page, then click and ad.
So if Google were to send everyone to sites that were providing a poor user experience and/or irrelevant content, then no one would come back and use Google, giving them the $59 Billion dollars they made in 2014.
In a nutshell, if your site isn’t providing a world class experience, don’t expect it to be getting free traffic from Google for much longer.
How do we tell if Google hates us?
Google has a nifty tool that will tell you if your site is in fact mobile-friendly or not.
If the tool says the site is mobile friendly then you you have nothing to worry about. If the tool says your site is not mobile friendly then there you may notice that your rankings on desktop seem to be ok, but on mobile they drop out of existence.
Considering that we are seeing some of our clients with up to 83% (at the time of writing) of their Google traffic coming from a mobile device, it’s worth paying attention now while your competitors are off dozing, because you might just leapfrog them in the rankings.
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