Google Webmaster Trends Analyst John Mueller tweeted that the boost it earlier posted about favoring mobile-friendly sites is now live for all search results. If your site is not mobile-friendly you will see your Google search referrals go down and if your site works great in all mobile devices you should see some improvement. In essence, if two sites are equally targeted to be a top search result for a given query the site that is the most mobile friendly will show up while the other site will move down the list.
Gary Illyes, one of the faces of Google webmaster relations in the post-Matt Cutts era, gave an interview to Search Engine Journal discussing Accelerated Mobile Pages, the Mobile-Friendly update, and more.
When mobile-friendliness came up in the conversation, he noted that things have gotten a lot better over the past year. Just to give you an idea of how much importance Google places on mobile-friendliness, consider this quote from Illyes:
If I could ask one thing from the SEOs, it would be to decrease page load times on the sites they manage. It makes a huge difference for the users!
AMP of course plays into this. It does stand for Accelerated Mobile Pages after all. Google has indicated in the past that using AMP will make your site mobile-friendly, so you’ll be able to pass Google’s test for that.
Unfortunately, there are apparently a lot of so-called SEOs that aren’t even aware of AMP, let alone using it.
Google doesn’t like app install interstitials, and it doesn’t like sneaky workarounds for things, so it should come as no surprise that it doesn’t like sneaky workarounds for app install interstitials.
As an update to its mobile-friendly algorithm in November, Google said pages with an app install interstitial that hide a significant amount of content on the transition from the search result page won’t be considered mobile-friendly.
“Instead of full page interstitials, we recommend that webmasters use more user-friendly formats such as app install banners,” Google said at the time. “We hope that this change will make it easier for searchers to see the content of the pages they are looking for.”
Some app owners have found a way around this, but what they’re doing may not help them for much longer.
Barry Schwartz at Search Engine Roundtable points to a Q&A in a Google webmaster hangout (start at 49 minutes in).
Someone points out Yelp specifically as an example (which is interesting given the company’s vocal opposition to Google’s policy on this) of a mobile site that uses a “splash screen that’s not really a splash screen,” because it just makes the user scroll down.
According to Google’s John Mueller, Google may take manual actions on things like this and may even alter its algorithm to penalize such practices.
Google has been talking up Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) for months, promising a February launch date for when it would start sending search traffic from Google results to pages using it. Many are no doubt wondering if utilizing AMP will give them a ranking boost. Well, Google addressed that.
Have you set up AMP for your site yet? How was the experience? Discuss.
Earlier this week, Google began showing AMP results in search results. In fact, this came a day earlier than expected and earlier than when Google actually made the announcement. We posted about it prior to the announcement, but let’s take a moment and look at what Google has said since then.
The announcement came on Wednesday. Google said:
In just over four months, AMP has come a long way, with hundreds of publishers, scores of technology companies and ad-tech businesses all taking part in this joint mission to improve the mobile web for everyone. And starting today, we’ll make it easy to find AMP webpages in relevant mobile search results, giving you a lightning-fast reading experience for top stories.
Now when you search for a story or topic on Google from a mobile device, webpages created using AMP will appear when relevant in the Top Stories section of the search results page. Any story you choose to read will load blazingly fast—and it’s easy to scroll through the article without it taking forever to load or jumping all around as you read. It’s also easy to quickly flip through the search results just by swiping from one full-page AMP story to the next.
According to the company, pages built with AMP load an average of four times faster and use 10 times less data than equivalent non-AMP pages.
The company didn’t mention AMP as a ranking signal in the announcement. Word around the industry was that Google would likely make it one. At launch, however, it is not. Still, that doesn’t mean it won’t become one.
During a recent webmaster hangout, Google’s John Mueller was asked about this. Here is what he said (via Search Engine Roundtable):
AMP a ranking signal…At the moment, it’s not a ranking signal. So it’s obviously one way to make mobile friendly pages, so that might be an option where I’ve already seen some sites where they’ve moved their whole website to the AMP format, and obviously that’s a mobile-friendly set-up, so that kind of gets that mobile-friendly boost, but just AMP itself is not something that we have as a ranking signal at the moment.
Mobile-friendly was of course announced as a ranking signal roughly a year ago. Even if AMP isn’t directly a ranking signal on its own, it will naturally put you on the path of another ranking signal.
In fact, stands to reason that it will help you out beyond just mobile-friendly, but also with page speed, which Google announced as a ranking signal quite some time ago.
This week, WordPress.com sites began supporting AMP automatically, and there’s a new plugin for self-hosted WordPress sites. From the WordPress.org plugin directory:
With the plugin active, all posts on your site will have dynamically generated AMP-compatible versions, accessible by appending /amp/ to the end your post URLs. For example, if your post URL is http://example.com/2016/01/01/amp-on/, you can access the AMP version at http://example.com/2016/01/01/amp-on/amp/. If you do not have pretty permalinks enabled, you can do the same thing by appending ?amp=1, i.e. http://example.com/2016/01/01/amp-on/?amp=1
Note #1: that Pages and archives are not currently supported.
Note #2: this plugin only creates AMP content but does not automatically display it to your users when they visit from a mobile device. That is handled by AMP consumers such as Google Search.
As you’re probably aware, Google made mobile-friendliness a ranking signal earlier this year. Since (and even before) doing so, the company has provided webmasters with a tool that lets them check their pages to ensure that they are indeed mobile-friendly. This is something that’s probably largely taken for granted as Google doesn’t give you tools that let you know if you pass the test for all of its signals.
Bing has also indicated it will take mobile-friendliness into account when ranking web pages, and today announced the launch of its own mobile-friendliness tool.
“The Mobile Friendliness Test tool runs checks on all of these key factors and additionally checks for and reports on resources that are needed to analyze the page fully but that we weren’t able to crawl due to robots.txt constraints,” Bing says. “This way rendering issues (as seen in the page preview) can be fixed by webmasters by updating robots.txt in such a way that Bing can accurately determine the mobile-friendliness of the sites.”
“When you submit the URL of a page to be analyzed to the Mobile Friendliness Test tool, our Bing Mobile crawler fetches and renders the page, extracting important features that are used by the tool to determine how the page performs against each of the above factors,” it adds. “The outcomes are then aggregated into a consolidated mobile-friendliness verdict for the page.”
Bing lists the following as factors it considers with regard to mobile-friendliness: viewport and zoom control configuration; width of page content; readability of text on the page; spacing of links and other elements on page; use of incompatible plug-ins. You can get more details about each of these here.
Google had been hinting for months that app-install interstitials would become a negative ranking signal in search results, and about two months ago, they made it official.
Google announced that it was updating the Mobile-Friendly algorithm and test, advising sites against showing app install interstitials “that hide a significant amount of content on the transition from the search result page”.
As you probably know, Google introduced the mobile-friendly ranking signal earlier this year. It provided sites with a helpful mobile-friendly test tool so that they can make sure their pages were up to snuff. If a page passed the test, it would be good as far as that particular signal is concerned. The interstitials element adds a new factor to mobile-friendliness that will cause some that previously passed the test to now fail.
Google announced this week that the new addition is now officially live in the algorithm.
Google’s latest announcement was made at 2:24 (Eastern) on Monday. Have you seen any changes yet? Let us know in the comments.
Starting today, pages with an app install interstitial that hide a significant amount of content on the transition from the search result page won’t be considered mobile-friendly.
Instead of full page interstitials, we recommend that webmasters use more user-friendly formats such as app install banners. We hope that this change will make it easier for searchers to see the content of the pages they are looking for.
For a little more background, Google had this to say about it in September:
After November 1, mobile web pages that show an app install interstitial that hides a significant amount of content on the transition from the search result page will no longer be considered mobile-friendly. This does not affect other types of interstitials. As an alternative to app install interstitials, browsers provide ways to promote an app that are more user-friendly.>
App install banners are supported by Safari (as Smart Banners) and Chrome (as Native App Install Banners). Banners provide a consistent user interface for promoting an app and provide the user with the ability to control their browsing experience. Webmasters can also use their own implementations of app install banners as long as they don’t block searchers from viewing the page’s content.
Ahead of the announcement, Google shared results of some internal testing it did with its Google+ app showing that an app install interstitial negatively impacted the user experience. Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman was very vocal about his opposition to Google’s position on the matter.
After Google shared its study results, Stoppelman said on Twitter, “Google says stop pushing App downloads yet its own team push apps using same ‘bad’ designs. Is this about protecting consumers or protecting their search monopoly?”
He later wrote a guest post for Search Engine Land asking the same question. In that, he said, “While many users find apps by browsing inside an app store, another critical way they discover new apps is through mobile search engines, like Google. In this way, mobile search indeed serves a critical function to users: offering a bridge from the less desirable world of mobile Web browsing to a new world inside apps.”
He went on to discuss how apps threaten Google’s search business. After that, LinkedIn publicly questioned Google’s findings as well. They started off by saying that nobody wants Google+ for one thing.
“Naturally, an interstitial that interrupts the user experience to promote something that most people don’t want is bound to backfire,” wrote Omar Restom, mobile product manager at LinkedIn. “Google shouldn’t extrapolate based on this one case. ”
“Google admits that it was showing their interstitial even to users who already have the app – that’s bad mojo and fundamentally bad audience targeting,” he added. “Again, Google should only have shown this promo to people who actually want and need the app. The Google+ Team also violated Google’s own SEO policy by showing this interstitial on SEO Pages.”
He went on to make the case that LinkedIn’s interstitials work better because of better targeting and better creatives. Restom also backed up his argument with some numbers, comparing clickthrough rate, bounce rate and incremental app downloads driven between Google+ and LinkedIn.
Do you agree with Yelp and LinkedIn about Google’s findings? Do you think Google is doing the right thing with this ranking signal? Share your thoughts in the comments.
Earlier this year, Google began taking into account a site’s mobile-friendliness for ranking search results on mobile devices. It provided sites with a helpful mobile-friendly test tool so that they can make sure their pages were up to snuff. If a page passed the test, it would be good as far as that particular signal is concerned. Now, there’s a new factor in that mobile-friendliness that will cause some that previously passed the test to now fail.
Google has been hinting for a while that app-install interstitials would become a negative ranking signal in search results, and now it’s official. Or at least it will be soon.
Do you use app-install interstitials on your mobile web pages? What do you think about Google’s latest ranking signal? Share your thoughts in the comments.
The company announced on Tuesday that it is updating its Mobile-Friendly Test to advise sites against showing app install interstitials “that hide a significant amount of content on the transition from the search result page”.
Google says its Mobile Usability report in Search Console will show webmasters the number of pages across their site that have the issue.
While the mobile-friendly test tool has already been updated to take the new signal into account, Google will not actually start counting interstitials negatively until November 1, so that should give webmasters enough time to make the updates they need to to avoid being algorithmically penalized. Google says:
After November 1, mobile web pages that show an app install interstitial that hides a significant amount of content on the transition from the search result page will no longer be considered mobile-friendly. This does not affect other types of interstitials. As an alternative to app install interstitials, browsers provide ways to promote an app that are more user-friendly.>
App install banners are supported by Safari (as Smart Banners) and Chrome (as Native App Install Banners). Banners provide a consistent user interface for promoting an app and provide the user with the ability to control their browsing experience. Webmasters can also use their own implementations of app install banners as long as they don’t block searchers from viewing the page’s content.
Keep an eye on the Webmaster Central forum for chatter about this as time progresses.
Google recently shared results of some internal testing it did with its Google+ app showing that an app install interstitial negatively impacted the user experience. Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman has been very vocal about his opposition to Google’s position on this matter.
After Google shared its study results, Stoppelman said on Twitter, “Google says stop pushing App downloads yet its own team push apps using same ‘bad’ designs. Is this about protecting consumers or protecting their search monopoly?”
He later wrote a guest post for Search Engine Land asking the same question. In that, he said, “While many users find apps by browsing inside an app store, another critical way they discover new apps is through mobile search engines, like Google. In this way, mobile search indeed serves a critical function to users: offering a bridge from the less desirable world of mobile Web browsing to a new world inside apps.”
He went on to discuss how apps threaten Google’s search business. Since then, LinkedIn has been publicly questioning Google’s findings as well. They started off by saying that nobody wants Google+ for one thing.
“Naturally, an interstitial that interrupts the user experience to promote something that most people don’t want is bound to backfire,” wrote Omar Restom, mobile product manager at LinkedIn. “Google shouldn’t extrapolate based on this one case. ”
“Google admits that it was showing their interstitial even to users who already have the app – that’s bad mojo and fundamentally bad audience targeting,” he added. “Again, Google should only have shown this promo to people who actually want and need the app. The Google+ Team also violated Google’s own SEO policy by showing this interstitial on SEO Pages.”
He went on to make the case that LinkedIn’s interstitials work better because of better targeting and better creatives. Restom also backed up his argument with some numbers, comparing clickthrough rate, bounce rate and incremental app downloads driven between Google+ and LinkedIn.
Stoppelman has since tweeted about LinkedIn’s post a couple times and various other articles on the subject.
VC Bill Gurley tweeted:
I am hearing lots of frustration/complaints/surprise about this recent move inside our portfolio. https://t.co/DP0W3xA2AB
Some are questioning why Google is specifically targeting these types of interstitials specifically as opposed to all interstitials (desktop included) that block content.
Update: Search Engine Roundtable says there was no update on the date Enge points to.
While we certainly don’t know for sure, there are signs that Google could be turning up the dial on just how impactful mobile-friendliness is as a ranking signal for websites.
As you’ll recall, Google launched an update in April, which it had announced months earlier, that was aimed at giving sites that are mobile-friendly (and pass Google’s mobile-friendly test) a boost in search rankings. It was still meant to only be one of many signals Google uses, but a signal nonetheless. Prior to its launch, the update became synonymous with “Mobilegeddon” as webmasters and SEOs braced for a big shake-up in search results.
Early reports after the launch however suggested that the impact may not have been so great after all. Even Google’s own Gary Illyes suggested that the number of sites may have been lower since so many sites became mobile friendly in anticipation of the update.
One study we recently looked at came from Stone Temple Consulting, who has been doing some great research into how Google works (see our coverage of their studies on Google’s indexing of tweets).
According to that, nearly half (46%) of non-mobile-friendly URLs that held top 10 spots on April 17 lost ranking, while fewer than 20% gained. Other findings included:
– For URLs that dropped in ranking, the drop for non-friendly URLs was more pronounced – an average of 2 spots – than for mobile-friendly URLs – average of .25 spots.
– Another significant effect was that URLs being favored for mobile-friendly sites are often different from the ones that ranked earlier.
– Overall, the study found a 1.3% increase in mobile-friendly URLs in search results. While this does not approach the impact of Panda or Penguin algorithm updates, this is the first such change by Google, and we expect more changes and an increased impact over time favoring mobile-friendly sites.
Stone Temple’s Eric Enge concluded in the report, “In summary, I’d suggest that the impact of this release was indeed significantly bigger than originally met the eye. The trade press did not see it as large because of the slow roll out, and the intervening Search Quality Update. In addition, this is likely just the start of what Google plans to do with this algorithm. It is typical for Google to test some things and see how they work. Once they have tuned it, and gain confidence on how the algo works on the entire web as a data set, they can turn up the volume and make the impact significantly higher. It’s my expectation that they will do that. In the long run, don’t be surprised if the impact of this algorithm becomes even greater, and that people will stop debating whether or not it was greater than Panda or Penguin.”
Enge shared some additional analysis related to the update on Google+ today. He believes he has found a sign that Google may be giving the mobile friendly signal more weight now. Here’s the post:
It wouldn’t be much of a surprise to see Google giving the signal more weight. They did make a pretty big deal about it ahead of the launch, and gave webmasters and SEOs a great deal of notice in advance. Google has also been talking about how mobile search volumes are overtaking desktop in a number of countries. As that gap continues to widen in favor of mobile, it only makes sense that Google utilize this signal more.
In related news, Adobe released its Digital Advertising Report for Q2. While it’s only a small section of the broader report, it does look at the impact of Google’s mobile-friendly update. According to that, organic traffic was up to 10% lower among sites with low mobile engagement.
“While there wasn’t a precipitous drop among non-friendly sites, the effect is pronounced over the 10 weeks after the event,” said Tamara Gaffney, principal at Adobe Digital Index. “Such continued loss of traffic suggests that immediate emphasis would have been placed on paid search as a quick way to recover traffic. But that strategy is not necessarily sustainable.”
“Brands that neglected to address their mobile Web strategies are seeing mobile advertising via Google’s network delivering less value at a greater cost, with a growing gap between mobile click-through rates (CTRs) and cost-per-clicks (CPCs),” Adobe says. “ADI reports mobile CPCs are up 16%, while CTRs are falling, down 9%.”
“Increases in CPC stretch marketing budgets due to what is known as click inflation–advertisers have to spend more just to stay even,” added Adobe Digital Index analyst Joe Martin.
You can read more on the report’s findings, including why Adobe says Google is “losing ground as a marketing vehicle” here. The full report is here.
Should Google crank up the dial on the mobile-friendly signal? Have you noticed anything on your end to suggest that they’ve done so? Let us know in the comments.
Last month, Google casually noted in a blog post that mobile searches have overtaken desktop searches in ten countries including the United States and Japan. It didn’t elaborate on what the other countries were.
Now, Google has mentioned another country by name. You can add the United Kingdom to that list. Matt Jackson at SocialMediaToday reports:
During a presentation at London Tech Week, Google’s Eileen Naughton said that not only are more searches conducted on UK mobile devices than on UK desktops, but that more UK YouTube searches were also conducted on mobile devices.
The YouTube part is interesting as well, as Google hasn’t mentioned that before when talking about this subject, at least to my knowledge.
The growing mobile search trend obviously illustrates why Google has put so much emphasis on websites being mobile-friendly and begun taking app indexing into account when ranking search results.
The world is going mobile, and websites that don’t follow are going to be left behind. A recent study found that the mobile-friendly update bumped down about half of pages it threatened to, but it’s still early days. It’s not as if mobile-friendliness is going to become less of a factor going forward.
Google released an algorithm update on April 21 that began taking the mobile-friendliness of a site into account when ranking that site in search results. It’s still just one of many signals Google uses, and it’s not as significant as relevance or quality, but it is clearly a factor Google is taking very seriously as more searches are performed from mobile devices than on desktop now.
The update was largely known as “Mobilegeddon” before it actually launched, but that name has been heavily questioned since then as the severity of its effects have been debated.
Was your site affected by Mobilegeddon? Have you seen any impact as time has gone on? Do you think the whole thing was overblown? Share your thoughts in the comments.
As Google’s John Mueller put it, “While it’s had a fairly big impact across all the search results, it doesn’t mean that in every search result you will see very big changes.”
Last week, we looked at a report from Koozai, which polled 2000 SMEs and found that 45% saw ranking changes, and 41% of those were concerned that they had seen a drop in rankings by at least three places and had noticed a drop in traffic as a result. Some of these saw as much as a 50% decline. 27% said they had seen a drop in rankings even though they had optimized for mobile. 37% were said to be concerned that the update might have an impact on sales, while 44% were not worried as they said most of their sales came from desktops.
12% were apparently completely oblivious to Google’s mobile-friendly test tool as they said they didn’t even know whether their websites were optimized for mobile or not. 49% said they didn’t know if sales on their desktops sites had initially come from visitors viewing their products or services on mobile.
Since then, we looked at a poll from Search Engine Roundtable based on a thousand responses. In that, only 11% said the update resulted in changes in their traffic or rankings, while on overwhelming 65% provided an absolute “no” response. 13% said “unsure,” and 11% said, “sometimes”.
The poll began on April 28, which was one week after the update launched.
“I don’t think the poll would change much today, in fact, I think that 65% number would be closer to 75% or 80%,” writes Search Engine Roundtable’s Barry Schwartz.
Now Eric Enge’s Stone Temple Consulting has some research out looking at the effects of the update. According to that, nearly half (46%) of non-mobile-friendly URLs that help top 10 spots on April 17 lost ranking, while fewer than 20% gained. Other findings as relayed by Stone Temple include:
– For URLs that dropped in ranking, the drop for non-friendly URLs was more pronounced – an average of 2 spots – than for mobile-friendly URLs – average of .25 spots.
– Another significant effect was that URLs being favored for mobile-friendly sites are often different from the ones that ranked earlier.
– Overall, the study found a 1.3% increase in mobile-friendly URLs in search results. While this does not approach the impact of Panda or Penguin algorithm updates, this is the first such change by Google, and we expect more changes and an increased impact over time favoring mobile-friendly sites.
Enge had this to say in summary:
In summary, I’d suggest that the impact of this release was indeed significantly bigger than originally met the eye. The trade press did not see it as large because of the slow roll out, and the intervening Search Quality Update.
In addition, this is likely just the start of what Google plans to do with this algorithm. It is typical for Google to test some things and see how they work. Once they have tuned it, and gain confidence on how the algo works on the entire web as a data set, they can turn up the volume and make the impact significantly higher.
It’s my expectation that they will do that. In the long run, don’t be surprised if the impact of this algorithm becomes even greater, and that people will stop debating whether or not it was greater than Panda or Penguin.
In other Google algorithm update news, the company says a Panda update will likely come within the next four weeks, and they’re still working on making Penguin run continuously.
Check out our recent discussion with Enge regarding Google’s partnership with Twitter here.
Now that it’s been well over a month and counting, what do you think of the mobile-friendly update’s impact on search results? Share your thoughts in the comments.
Another survey has been conducted regarding Google’s recent mobile-friendly update, which prior to release, had often been billed as “Mobilegeddon”. After its release it quickly became clear that it was anything but.
Search Engine Roundtable released results from a poll it ran after getting a thousand responses. The source of the poll is worth taking into consideration as we’re talking about a widely read industry blog with readers comprised of those very much in the know about SEO and search-related happenings.
The poll found that only 11% said the update resulted in changes in their traffic or rankings, while on overwhelming 65% provided an absolute “no” response. 13% said “unsure,” and 11% said, “sometimes”.
The poll began on April 28, which was one week after the update launched.
“I don’t think the poll would change much today, in fact, I think that 65% number would be closer to 75% or 80%,” writes Search Engine Roundtable’s Barry Schwartz.
Last week, we looked at some recent findings from a Koozai of 2000 small-to-medium-sized enterprises across the United States, which indicated that most agreed the “Mobilegeddon” label was overhyped and unhelpful.
Still, 45% of businesses surveyed claimed they had experienced changes to their rankings or traffic as a result of the update, and 41% of those were concerned that they had seen a drop in rankings by at least three places and had noticed a drop in traffic as a result. Some of these saw as much as a 50% decline. 27% said they had seen a drop in rankings even though they had optimized for mobile. 37% were said to be concerned that the update might have an impact on sales, while 44% were not worried as they said most of their sales came from desktops.
12% were apparently completely oblivious to Google’s mobile-friendly test tool as they said they didn’t even know whether their websites were optimized for mobile or not. 49% said they didn’t know if sales on their desktops sites had initially come from visitors viewing their products or services on mobile.
“While it’s had a fairly big impact across all the search results, it doesn’t mean that in every search result you will see very big changes,” Google’s John Mueller said a while back. “So that is something that affects a lot of different sites, a lot of different queries, but it is not such that the sites disappear from the search results completely if they are not mobile friendly.”
While mobile-friendliness is certainly a signal you’ll want to take advantage of, Google also launched another mobile ranking factor even before that. It now uses App Indexing as a signal, and last week, announced the expansion of App Indexing to iOS after previously only offering it for Android.
So was Google’s mobile-friendly algorithm update (“Mobilegeddon”) overhyped or not? Well, perhaps yes and no. While the initial consensus after the update’s launch was that changes in search rankings were minimal, a recent study indicates that small-to-medium sized enterprises did see some significant changes – just not complete ranking obliteration as the “Mobilegeddon” name suggested.
Did your site see any rankings shift whatsoever after the mobile-friendly update? Positive or negative? Was your site optimized for mobile? Let us know in the comments.
Google released an algorithm update on April 21 that began taking the mobile-friendliness of a site into account when ranking that site in search results. It’s still just one of many signals Google uses, and it’s not as significant as relevance or quality, but it is clearly a factor Google is taking very seriously as more searches are performed from mobile devices than on desktop now.
Ahead of the update there was borderline mass hysteria as reports would have had you believe sites that weren’t optimized for mobile faced the possibility of disappearing from the search results. That didn’t exactly happen. Not only was the weight of this signal over-implied, but many sites rushed to comply with Google’s mobile-friendly guidelines leading up to that date, and ultimately the rankings just didn’t change all that much based on early reports.
Google’s John Mueller recently had this to say about the update:
I think one of the difficulties here is that it is a very broad change. So while it’s had a fairly big impact across all the search results, it doesn’t mean that in every search result you will see very big changes. So that is something that affects a lot of different sites, a lot of different queries, but it is not such that the sites disappear from the search results completely if they are not mobile friendly.
On the one hand, that makes a lot of sense for the sites that aren’t able to go mobile friendly yet, maybe like small businesses who don’t have the time or the money to set their sites for that. These are results that are still fairly relevant in the search results, so we need to keep them in there some how.
The other aspect that we noticed is that a lot of sites really moved forward on going mobile. So where we expected essentially a little bit of a bigger change, because of maybe bigger sites that weren’t mobile friendly, did take the time to go mobile friendly and with that, they didn’t see that much of a change.
Since then, digital marketing agency Koozai has released results from a study of 2000 SMEs across the US, finding that businesses experienced a drop in organic rankings and traffic even though they had optimized their sites for mobile, and that many have been left confused by the results.
The study also suggests that many businesses did indeed see ranking changes, it just wasn’t to the point of “mobile gedddon”. It was more like their sites dropped down a few spots. So, pretty much like Mueller was saying. Still, even these milder drops have led to significant traffic decreases in some cases.
The study found that 69% of businesses said the suggestion that the update would cause “mobilegeddon” was overhyped, incorrect, and unhelpful. Frankly I’m surprised that number wasn’t higher.
45% of businesses claimed they had experienced changes to their rankings or traffic as a result of the update, and 41% of those were concerned that they had seen a drop in rankings by at least three places and had noticed a drop in traffic as a result. Some of these saw as much as a 50% decline. 27% said they had seen a drop in rankings even though they had optimized for mobile. 37% were said to be concerned that the update might have an impact on sales, while 44% were not worried as they said most of their sales came from desktops.
12% were apparently completely oblivious to Google’s mobile-friendly test tool as they said they didn’t even know whether their websites were optimized for mobile or not.
49% said they didn’t know if sales on their desktops sites had initially come from visitors viewing their products or services on mobile.
“The hype that the Google mobile update would cause carnage in the search engine rankings missed the larger picture. Exaggerating the impact meant that businesses didn’t anticipate that even small changes in their ranking can have an big impact on their organic mobile search results,” said Ben Norman, CEO of Koozai. “The survey reveals inconsistent effects are being felt by businesses that has resulted in confusion and concern. When a business has optimized for mobile then drops three places, it is understandable that they feel angry that they have acted on Google’s warnings and yet have still experienced a negative impact.”
“With more than 200 Google ranking factors, many businesses may have dropped in the organic search results when a competitor optimized for mobile because they were better optimized for some of these other ranking factors,” he added. “The survey also uncovered a worrying lack of understanding in the SME community of ecommerce analytics. Many consumers today will research on mobile than go onto purchase on desktop. Many SMEs are missing out on these lead creation opportunities if they don’t know if their ecommerce sites aren’t giving their potential customers a good experience on mobile.”
A lot of the news out of Google this week has been related to another mobile ranking signal the company announced at the same time it announced the mobile-friendly update. That’s app indexing. While it was initially just for Android, Google announced that it will begin indexing content in iOS apps.
At its Google I/O developer conference, it also announced “Now on Tap,” which will be built into the next version of Android, and will enable users to get contextually relevant information from Google Now sources. App indexing reportedly figures into this as well, and can give you more opportunities to get your app content in front of users.
Did you see any effects from the mobile-friendly update? Tell us about them.
In November, Bing principal program manager Mir Rosenberg wrote in a blog post, “We started probing web pages for ‘mobile friendliness’ and ranking web pages accordingly on our users’ mobile phones.”
Bing had begun using mobile friendliness as a ranking signal for a “small but steadily growing percentage” of mobile queries. Apparently that growth was pretty slow, as a full roll-out is still only on the horizon.
In a new blog post, Bing’s Shyam Jayasankar announced that Bing “will be rolling out mobile friendliness as a signal in ranking.” Apparently the older announcement was just about future plans, thought it didn’t make it sound that way. Either way, like Google, Bing also cares if your site is mobile-friendly.
Last month, Bing began labeling results as “mobile-friendly” just like Google started doing last year as it prepared to get sites ready for the algorithmic adjustment.
Here’s an example of how results might change as a result of the mobile-friendly signal:
Bing isn’t saying exactly when the update will fully roll out, but you probably won’t need to worry about it too much if you’ve already made your site mobile-friendly for Google users or are in the process of doing so.
As an added bonus, Bing is working on a tool to help webmasters analyze webpages using its mobile-friendliness classifier. This will become available in a few week. Or you could probably just use Google’s.
More about Bing’s mobile-friendly efforts here and here.
It turns out Google’s mobile-friendly update didn’t quite have the doomsday impact that some thought it might. I can’t say I’m shocked. While it’s clearly a significant update, these cries of “mobilegeddon” always felt a little sensational to me. While the importance of having a mobile-friendly site can’t be overstated, the fact is that many sites were already mobile-friendly, and it’s still just one of many signals Google uses in its algorithm.
This came with the caveat that while the update had completed its roll-out, Google still hadn’t indexed everything yet.
This week, 3Q Digital put out a report looking at the effects of the update using the Searchmetrics Mobile SEO Visibility Metric and comparing it with Sessions recorded in Google Analytics. These were the main takeaways:
– The sites that showed an increase in their Mobile SEO Visibility were leveraging site builds for dedicated mobile sites and responsive designed sites
– The one dynamically served site hasn’t seen clear benefit nor any detriment to its Mobile SEO Visibility levels
– Traffic levels for all sites do not yet show clear increased levels
– We’re only a little over a week since the update was announced; there’s a good chance we’ll begin to see latent traffic increases towards the beginning to middle of May – and beyond
Google’s John Mueller weighed in on the lack of a major impact from the update in Webmaster Central hangout (via Search Engine Roundtable).
Here’s what he had to say on the subject:
I think one of the difficulties here is that it is a very broad change. So while it’s had a fairly big impact across all the search results, it doesn’t mean that in every search result you will see very big changes. So that is something that affects a lot of different sites, a lot of different queries, but it is not such that the sites disappear from the search results completely if they are not mobile friendly.
On the one hand, that makes a lot of sense for the sites that aren’t able to go mobile friendly yet, maybe like small businesses who don’t have the time or the money to set their sites for that. These are results that are still fairly relevant in the search results, so we need to keep them in there some how.
The other aspect that we noticed is that a lot of sites really moved forward on going mobile. So where we expected essentially a little bit of a bigger change, because of maybe bigger sites that weren’t mobile friendly, did take the time to go mobile friendly and with that, they didn’t see that much of a change.
While the immediate impact may not have been felt far and wide in a “mobilegeddon” sense, that doesn’t mean sites won’t continue to see effects from this as other sites continue to make their sites mobile-friendly. Even early winners from the update could find their content knocked back down when competing pages go mobile-friendly in the future.
A survey from gShift last month, ahead of the update’s roll-out, found that 52% of businesses polled expected their sites to be impacted by the update. 65% indicated they were factoring mobile SEO into their content strategies, which means that another 35% were not.
This week, Google announced the launch of the new Search Analytics report in Google Webmaster Tools. While it can be used on a much broader basis, one thing Google suggested using it for is for looking at how your site has been affected by the mobile-friendly update.
Google announced the release of the new Search Analytics report in Webmaster Tools, which it promises will deliver webmasters more precise data. It is replacing the Search Queries report, which the company says is the most used feature in Webmaster Tools.
“If you manage a website, you need a deep understanding of how users find your site and how your content appears on Google’s search results,” says Google’s Zineb Ait Bahajji “Until now, this data was shown in the Search Queries report, probably the most used feature in Webmaster Tools. Over the years, we’ve been listening to your feedback and features requests. How many of you wished they could compare traffic on desktop and mobile? How many of you needed to compare metrics in different countries? or in two different time frames?”
The new report is designed to help you solve such problems. You can break down your site’s search data and filter it in “many different ways”. Google specifically suggests using it to compare your mobile traffic before and after the big Google Mobile-Friendly update (Mobilegeddon).
You can use it to find the countries where people search most for your brand by choosing impressions, filtering by your brand name, and grouping results by country.
These are just a couple examples Google gave, but you should be able to do a lot more with the report than that.
“There are some differences between Search Analytics and Search Queries,” Bahajji notes. “Data in the Search Analytics report is much more accurate than data in the older Search Queries report, and it is calculated differently. To learn more read out Search Analytics Help Center article’s section about data. Because we understand that some of you will still need to use the old report, we’ve decided to leave it available in Google Webmaster Tools for three additional months. To learn more about the new report, please read our Search Analytics Help Center article.”
The default view of the report shows your site’s click count coming from Google search results for the previous four weeks. Just select one or more metric checkboxes at the top to change what it shows. Clicks, Impressions, CTR, and Position are the available metrics.
It appears that Google’s mobile-friendly update has fully rolled out, but as of Friday morning, not all pages had been indexed yet, so it’s possible that you’ll still see effects from it that haven’t taken place just yet. That said, it sounds like the impact of the update is far less significant than the “Mobilegeddon” headlines would have had you believe.
Google webmaster trends analyst Gary Illyes tweeted that the algorithm is rolled out, but that not all pages were reindexed yet, so they don’t have the new scores yet (via Barry Schwartz):
@rustybrick Tricky question! The algo is rolled out, but not all pages were reindexed yet so they don't have the new scores. Yet.
As we’ve said over and over again leading up to the update, while mobile-friendliness is obviously important ranking signal to consider, it’s still just one of over 200 that Google uses.
If you haven’t had the chance to go mobile-friendly yet, you can do it anytime, and will send Google the right signal. Learn all about how to do so here.
On April 21, Google began rolling out its mobile-friendly update, which makes the mobile-friendliness of a site a ranking signal. It has largely become known as “Mobilegeddon” by publications with a flare for the dramatic, as this name was given to it before it even launched or its effects were even felt.
Were you prepared for the update? Was it “Mobilegeddon” for your site? Have you noticed any change (positive or negative) so far? Let us know in the comments.
As expected, Searchmetrics has released a list of winners and losers from the update. Given that the update likely hasn’t finished rolling out yet, even Searchmetrics itself cautions that these are only preliminary results.
Following are the lists, which were first posted on Saturday.
You can see SearchMetrics’ findings in a PDF here. They’re also updating data as the roll-out continues, so you can see the latest here.
The effects of “Mobilegeddon” do have the potential to be felt by many sites who haven’t paid attention to Google’s warning. The update was officially announced in February, and was hinted at for months before that. Google has given webmasters time to prepare.
Small businesses who don’t have the time or resources to dedicate to making their sites mobile-friendly, or even pay attention to the latest happenings in SEO, are likely to be hurt by the update the most. All of that said, this is still just one of over 200 signals Google is taking into account when ranking search results on mobile devices. It’s not everything. It’s also on a URL-by-URL basis, and is supposed to update in near real time, so webmasters can fix pages over time, and potentially increase their rankings without waiting months for Google to recognize these fixes, as they have with some other updates.
Last week, Lawyer.com, a site which helps people find law firms, announced that it had analyzed the law sites in its database, and found that many of them will likely be affected negatively by Google’s update. 46% of solo firms failed Google’s requirements, it said, while larger firms did a little better with a 33% failure rate.
The reality is that the update shouldn’t affect any particular vertical more than the next. It’s not like Panda where it is specifically looking at the type of content. It’s strictly looking at technical elements that enable the content to be consumed on a mobile device with ease. Even if your content completely sucks, it can pass Google’s mobile-friendly test. It may not help you with other signals, but that’s a different story.
Last week, Google put its latest round of guidance related to the update. This included an FAQ. The important takeaways from that included:
– The update does not affect searches on tablets or desktops, and it’s a page-level change. Only mobile-friendly pages will be able to get a boost as a direct result of the change.
– Google determines whether or not a page is mobile-friendly every time it’s crawled, so webmasters won’t have to wait for another update after they fix a page for it to get the advantage of the signal. This also means that if you weren’t quite ready for the update today, it shouldn’t be that big a deal as long as you can still fix what need’s fixing.
– Google is saying now that the roll-out should take “a week or so”. You can’t determine whether or not you’ve been impacted on April 22.
– If your pages are designed to work well on mobile devices, but aren’t passing Google’s mobile-friendly test, it’s probably because you’re blocking Googlebot for smartphones from crawling resources like JavaScript and CSS. This is the most common reason that happens.
– You can still link to sites that Google doesn’t consider mobile-friendly without fear of repercussions.
“It’s not the best experience for mobile visitors to go from a mobile-friendly page to a desktop-only page, but hopefully as more sites become mobile-friendly, this will become less of a problem,” says Google’s Maile Ohye.
– Mobile-friendliness is assessed the same regardless of whether a site is using responsive design, separate mobile URLs, or dynamic serving.
– It’s naive to think you don’t need to worry about the signal because you think your audience is desktop-only. More and more people are using mobile devices more as time goes on. Even if they’re mostly desktop-only now, that doesn’t mean it will stay that way.
– Pages with the old style of object YouTube embeds may register as not mobile-friendly. Make sure pages are using the newer iframe embeds.
– For tap target size, Google suggests a minimum of 7mm width/height for primary targets and a minimum margin of 5mm between secondary ones.
You an also read this for additional guidance on how to improve your site’s mobile-friendliness.
This week, Google began rolling out its dreaded mobile-friendly update. It’s unclear exactly how long it will take for the roll-out to complete, but it sounds like it will be at least a full week, based on what Google has said.
The company did indicate that it has rolled out completely in at least some of its data centers.
“So that is something where I think you will probably see that change over the course of a week, maybe a week and a half – something like that,” said Google’s John Mueller in a webmaster hangout. “From the first day to the next day, I don’t think you’ll see a big change. But if you compare last week to next week, then you should see a big change.”
While it’s still early to know what kinds of businesses are going to be impacted most, it does appear that law sites might get hit pretty hard.
Of course it’s not like the update is targeting any particular vertical, but law firm search engine Lawyer.com says it has reviewed mobile readiness across its database of over 100,000 U.S. law firm sites using Google’s mobile-friendly test on April 21, and found that 46% of solo firms failed Google’s requirements. Larger firms did a bit better with a 33% failure rate. The site says:
Websites for Texas-based law firms passed Google’s tests 68% of the time compared to only 65% for California-based law firms and 61% for both New York and Florida-based firms. Male owned solo firms passed slightly more often than female owned solo firms with rates of 60% and 58%, respectively. Websites of solo lawyers 50 years or older had a 54% pass rate while sites of younger solo lawyers reached 55%. Personal Injury law firms had the highest pass rate of all major practice areas (67%), while Real Estate firms had a low pass rate at only 57%. Patent law firms, which often have tech savvy partners, surprisingly had a low pass rate of just 44%.
Home pages of three of the top-five grossing law firms in the U.S. failed Google’s mobile-friendly test; Latham & Watkins, Skadden Arps, and Clifford Chance all have websites that can expect organic search traffic declines until adding responsive design elements. Google has indicated that drops in traffic will not be reflected immediately and may take over a week for indexing to occur.
“Making the necessary adjustments is extremely important for business websites in any industry,” said Lawyer.com CEO Gerald Gorman. “It is especially important in the legal services industry as most users now start their Lawyer search on Google using a mobile phone or tablet.”
SEO Clarity is keeping score on what’s happening with the update here. On the third day of the roll-out, it reported that out of 50,000 keywords it analyzed and the associated 60,000 domains appearing in the Top 10 results in Google’s desktop and mobile SERPs, that day showed a 0.5% change in the opposite direction.
Google advising websites to use HTML5 instead of Flash for multimedia is nothing new. What is new is that it can directly cost you search rankings now.
As you’ve probably hears by now, Google announced a new ranking signal based on websites’ mobile-friendliness. This went into effect beginning earlier this week, though it may take a week or to to completely roll out.
There are a lot of reasons your webpages may register as non-mobile-friendly, but one that is sure to be a problem is the use of Flash.
“Avoid common mistakes that frustrate mobile visitors, such as featuring unplayable videos (e.g., Flash video as the page’s significant content),” Google tells webmasters. “Mobile pages that provide a poor searcher experience can be demoted in rankings or displayed with a warning in mobile search results.”
Google has of course been warning against this for years.
All the way back in 2013, the company said this in a Webmaster Central blog post: “Many websites embed videos in a way that works well on desktops but is unplayable on smartphone devices. For example, if content requires Adobe Flash, it won’t be playable on an iPhone or on Android versions 4.1 and higher.”
“Instead of using a proprietary video player or putting content in unsupported formats, we recommend using HTML5 standard tags to include videos or animations,” Google says. “For animated content rendered using Flash or other multimedia players, consider using HTML5 animations that work across all web browsers. Google Web Designer makes it easy to create these animations in HTML5.”
Google posted a pair of blog posts about its new mobile-friendly update which has the webmaster world and businesses around the web on their toes. As you probably know, “Mobilegeddon,” or the new ranking signal began to roll out today. Google has said that it might take weeks for it to be completely rolled out.
In the meantime, Google is trying to make it as clear as possible what exactly is happening. The first of the aforementioned blog posts is a fairly brief reminder of the update, and the second is a more lengthy FAQ.
As the company notes in the former, the update is designed to let searchers more easily find “high quality and relevant results,” which have text that is easy to read without tapping or zooming, have tap targets that are spaced appropriately, and avoid unplayable content and horizontal scrolling. Google wants to reward sites on mobile devices that are friendly to users of those devices. Makes sense.
The update only affects rankings on mobile devices, and affects search results on a global basis. It applies to individual pages rather than entire websites, which is important to remember.
Google also wants you to remember that while it does consider this an important change, it sill uses a variety (over 200 in fact) of signals to rank search results. Intent of a search query is still a “very strong” signal it says, so even if a page isn’t mobile-friendly, but has high quality content, it could still rank highly.
Once again, Google says to check pages with its Mobile-Friendly Test or check the status of your entire site through the Mobile Usability report in Webmaster Tools.
“If your site’s pages aren’t mobile-friendly, there may be a significant decrease in mobile traffic from Google Search. But have no fear, once your site becomes mobile-friendly, we will automatically re-process (i.e., crawl and index) your pages,” it says. “You can also expedite the process by using Fetch as Google with Submit to Index, and then your pages can be treated as mobile-friendly in ranking.”
– The update does not affect searches on tablets or desktops, and it’s a page-level change. Only mobile-friendly pages will be able to get a boost as a direct result of the change.
– Google determines whether or not a page is mobile-friendly every time it’s crawled, so webmasters won’t have to wait for another update after they fix a page for it to get the advantage of the signal. This also means that if you weren’t quite ready for the update today, it shouldn’t be that big a deal as long as you can still fix what need’s fixing.
– Google is saying now that the roll-out should take “a week or so”. You can’t determine whether or not you’ve been impacted on April 22.
– If your pages are designed to work well on mobile devices, but aren’t passing Google’s mobile-friendly test, it’s probably because you’re blocking Googlebot for smartphones from crawling resources like JavaScript and CSS. This is the most common reason that happens.
– You can still link to sites that Google doesn’t consider mobile-friendly without fear of repercussions.
“It’s not the best experience for mobile visitors to go from a mobile-friendly page to a desktop-only page, but hopefully as more sites become mobile-friendly, this will become less of a problem,” says Google’s Maile Ohye.
– Mobile-friendliness is assessed the same regardless of whether a site is using responsive design, separate mobile URLs, or dynamic serving.
– It’s naive to think you don’t need to worry about the signal because you think your audience is desktop-only. More and more people are using mobile devices more as time goes on. Even if they’re mostly desktop-only now, that doesn’t mean it will stay that way.
– Pages with the old style of object YouTube embeds may register as not mobile-friendly. Make sure pages are using the newer iframe embeds.
– For tap target size, Google suggests a minimum of 7mm width/height for primary targets and a minimum margin of 5mm between secondary ones.
For more on how you can make your site mobile-friendly for how businesses have been preparing, read this.
About two months ago, Google announced two mobile-related algorithm changes. While it was somewhat surprising that Google announced them so clearly, the actual changes were not all that surprising. The first one was based on app indexing, which Google has been getting off the ground for the past year or so. It was already in effect the time of the announcement. The second was the use of a site’s mobile-friendliness as a ranking signal. Google had also been hinting at this for quite some time before the announcement, but this made it official.
At the time, Google said the mobile-friendly signal would take effect beginning on April 21. The time is now at hand.
Have you made changes to your site to prepare for the algorithm change? Did your site require any change in the first place? Let us know in the comments.
This is not an update that should be taken lightly. It’s one that is bound to affect a pretty large number of websites. Some are referring to it as “Mobilegeddon”. That’s probably going a little far, but it is something that businesses must take into account if they rely on search engines for traffic at all.
Search Engine Journal reminds us that the update will have a greater impact than either Panda or Penguin. Matt Southern recalls:
This was confirmed at SMX Munich this year when Zineb Ait Bahajji of Google’s Webmaster Trends team stated that the mobile friendly algorithm will have a greater impact than Panda or Penguin.
There was no estimate given as to what percentage of search queries might be impacted in total, but it wouldn’t be unreasonable to predict, given this information, that over 12% of mobile search queries will be impacted.
Keeping with the “Mobilegeddon” theme, Business Insider’s Jillian D’Onfro says the change “could crush millions of small businesses,” illustrating this point with a photo of Larry Page standing in front of a mushroom cloud. The article makes the case that small businesses will be hurt most by this because they’re the ones most likely not to know about it.
Despite the sensational, apocalyptic imagery, it does make a good point. As one recent survey illustrates, many small businesses simply don’t have the time to get their online marketing efforts right. You have to assume this includes keeping up with the latest SEO trends and Google updates.
As BI points out, however, there are plenty of larger businesses who may be taking a hit soon as well. It points to research from Somo, finding a bunch that seem ill-prepared. Among them: Nintendo, Windows Phone, American Apparel, Versace, and Channel 4, to name a few.
We recently looked at a survey from gShift, which found that over half of digital marketers across the retail, travel, and automotive industries, believe their business will be affected by the update. 20% said it won’t impact their business, and 28% were unsure.
More than 65% answered “affirmatively” to the question, “Is your company factoring in mobile strategies for SEO and content marketing in order to accommodate mobile search since learning about this change from Google?” At the same time, 20% said they are going to wait and see.
It’s worth noting that Google has indicated that the mobile-friendly ranking signal will run in real time, and will run on a page-by-page basis. In other words, if only some of your site is mobile-friendly, the parts that aren’t won’t necessarily hurt the entirety of your site. Also, as soon as you make a page mobile-friendly, that will be reflected in Google’s algorithm.
On the other hand, Google is also currently being called out for giving webmasters contradicting information about this kind of things, so who knows what to believe?
35% of the survey’s participants said mobile makes up between 11-50%of their website traffic.
In response to the question, “Do you think your website is currently mobile friendly?” over 68% answered yes. About half said they don’t use any tools to track their keyword rankings on desktop versus mobile.
How Do I Get My Site Mobile-Friendly?
Make friends with Google’s mobile-friendly test. Use it to enter URLs, and hit “analyze,”. It will tell you if your page is mobile-friendly, and if it’s not, it will give you reasons why.
If the page is deemed mobile-friendly, Google tell you how Googlebot sees the page. It might say something like, “This page uses 9 resources which are blocked by robots.txt. The results and screenshot may be incorrect.”
It will give you a link to expand such resources and get a look at what they actually are. It also gives you a link to learn how to unblock them for Googlebot.
If your URL is not deemed mobile-friendly, Google will tell you specific reasons, as well as info about how Googlebot sees it, and resources to help you fix issues. Reasons a page isn’t mobile friendly might include things like: “content wider than screen,” “uses incompatible plugins,” “links too close together,” “text too small to read,” “mobile viewport not set,” etc.
You’ll also want to make friends with Google’s Mobile SEO guide. Much of the following information comes from there.
Google recommends the following platforms for creating new sites, and chances are you’re already using one of them: WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, Blogger, vBulletin, Tumblr, DataLife Engine, Magento, Prestashop, Bitrix, and Google Sites. Google provides a dedicated guide for each one of these platforms for making your site mobile-friendly. You can find each of these here.
Google also gives the general guidelines of backing up your site before making any changes, updating your CMS to the latest version, making sure any custom themes you’re using are mobile-friendly, and reviewing support forums for the CMS to see what issues people might be having with the mobile versions of their sites.
To make sure a custom theme is mobile-friendly, view the theme from the admin panel of your CMS and look for words like “mobile” or “responsive” in the documentation, and if there’s a demo template available, put the URL into Google’s mobile-friendly test tool. Google also suggests making sure the template is fast by checking the Speed section of PageSpeed Insights and making sure the Speed section has no issues marked as “should fix”.
The former delves into creating your content and structure and making it responsive. The TL;DR of content creation as Google breaks it down, is: Identify the content you need first; Sketch out information architecture for narrow and wide viewports; and Create a skeleton view of the page with content but without styling. The TL;DR for making it responsive is as follows: Always use a viewport; Always start with a narrow viewport first and scale out; Base your breakpoints off when you need to adapt the content; and Create a high-level vision of your layout across major breakpoints.
The Web Starter Kit section is broken into three parts: Set Up Web Starter Kit, Development Phases, and How to Use the Style Guide.
Of course even though these documents are long, you’re probably still going to want to read them.
The Mobile SEO guide is separated into four parts: Choose your mobile configuration; Signal your configuration to search engines; Avoid common mistakes; and Configure for other devices.
The “Choose your mobile configuration” section deals with understanding different devices and key points in going mobile, selecting mobile configuration, and answers frequently asked questions. The “Signal your configuration to search engine” section talks about responsive web design, dynamic serving, and separate URLs.
The “common mistakes” part talks about blocking JavaScript, CSS and image files, unplayable content, faulty redirects, mobile-only 404s, app download interstitials, irrelevant cross-links, and slow mobile pages. That last part talks about configuring for tablets and feature phones (when Google says mobile, it’s referring to smartphones).
This whole mobile SEO guide is far too extensive to get into here, but you do need to know about it, and you’re going to want to go through it and make sure you’re not overlooking anything.
“Design your site to help make it easier for your customer to complete their most common tasks: from task conception, to visiting your site, to task completion,” Google says. “Outline the potential steps in your customers’ journey to make sure the steps are easy to complete on a mobile device. Try to streamline the experience and reduce the number of user interactions.”
“Making a mobile site requires prioritization,” it says. “Start by working out what the most important and common tasks are for your customers on mobile. Being able to support these tasks is critical and this is why the measure of your mobile site is how well customers can complete their objectives. There are ways to make the design of your site support ease of use too. Focus on consistency in your interface and providing an unified experience across platforms.”
Many site owners are simply going to have to get outside help. Google knows this, and also offers advice for working with developers. While Google elaborates here, it recommends asking to see your developer’s references and portfolio of mobile sites, making sure they understand your mobile customer, asking them to make a commitment to speed, having them install web analytics, making sure they’re aware of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines, and making sure the contract includes improving the mobile site after the initial launch.
It’s entirely possible to make a site mobile-friendly for no extra money. This is the case if you have skills required to implement the steps from Google’s guides discussed above or if you are able to use a responsive theme. Things can get more expensive if you have to hire the developer, so some sites are going to have to make a big choice.
Google says the top three mistakes beginners will want to avoid when it comes to creating a mobile-friendly site, are: forgetting their mobile customer; implementing the mobile site on a different domain, subdomain, or subdirectory from the desktop site; and working in isolation rather than looking around for inspiration. In other words, keep an eye on what others are doing.
Google also has this hour-long Q&A session on the topic available:
While the update won’t impact AdWords ads yet, there have been some “mobile-friendly” labels spotted on ads, so that might be coming in the future.
And in case you missed it, Bing also looks to mobile-friendliness as a ranking signal, so if you prepare for Google’s algorithm change, it’s bound to help you in Microsoft’s search engine as well.
It’s also worth noting that Google has expanded on its other mobile-related ranking signal. It announced last week that it will now show Android users apps in search results even when the user hasn’t already installed them.
“You’ve invested time and effort into making your app an awesome experience, and we want to help people find the great content you’ve created,” said product manager Lawrence Chang in a blog post. “App Indexing has already been helping people engage with your Android app after they’ve installed it — we now have 30 billion links within apps indexed. Starting this week, people searching on Google can also discover your app if they haven’t installed it yet. If you’ve implemented App Indexing, when indexed content from your app is relevant to a search done on Google on Android devices, people may start to see app install buttons for your app in search results. Tapping these buttons will take them to the Google Play store where they can install your app, then continue straight on to the right content within it.”
“With the addition of these install links, we are starting to use App Indexing as a ranking signal for all users on Android, regardless of whether they have your app installed or not,” he added. “We hope that Search will now help you acquire new users, as well as re-engage your existing ones.”
Interestingly enough, this news came just after the EU announced an investigation into Android.
