The media coined Google's latest algorithm update "Mobilegeddon" in order to convey its potentially catastrophic nature. Leading up to the change and in its immediate aftermath, many wondered if it would actually live up to that potential. Would non-mobile websites be as severely affected as many of the experts thought? We now know that the answer is yes for many of those sites.
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The idea behind the update is that mobile-friendly websites will now rank higher in search results on mobile devices. This is important given the fact that smartphones have become ubiquitous. In 2014, Gartner predicted that by 2018, roughly 50 percent of Internet users would access the Internet exclusively on mobile devices. This shift in how people use the Internet has resulted in the algorithm update, which causes websites that are not mobile friendly to fall in the rankings. The update was launched in April of 2015.
Factors that can cause Google to deem a site mobile unfriendly include the fact that it is poorly formatted to the screen size and has text that is difficult to read on a smaller screen. Google says that the layout and text should be large enough that users do not have to zoom or scroll horizontally and they should be able to click on links via a touch screen.
Within a month of the Google Mobilegeddon update, Marketing Land found that while some websites saw no changes in their traffic, others saw a drop of as much as 35 percent. In June, Search Engine Land reported that desktop search engine visibility was not affected by the update. In fact, some sites saw an increase in their visibility in desktop searches while seeing a decrease in their mobile visibility. A study by Moovweb found that Google had tagged 83 percent of top results as mobile-friendly. The search engine giant is clearly trying to get mobile friendly pages to rank higher. However, there are not presently enough websites actually providing mobile friendly pages for Google to offer mobile friendly pages at the tops of its SERPs.
None of this is expected to change. Not only are people relying on mobile devices at an increasing rate, Google has a huge stake in the mobile Internet. It created Android, which represented 80 percent of the mobile market as of 2014.
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