Google’s “mobile-friendly” algorithm coined as “Mobilegeddon” by the web developers was rolled out on April 21, 2015. This algorithm by Google stands true by its name as it takes mobile-friendliness into account while ranking search results.
With the constant advent of technology, Google needs to keep itself updated too. The study says that around 50% of all searches are now done from smartphones or tablets.
This means that if your website ranks much lower than the users of mobile phones or tablets, you will see your traffic go down. This won’t impact the searches done from PCs.
One of the effective ways to combat it is by switching to a responsive website that displays content differently depending on the device used to view it.
This, in turn, would help in optimizing the user’s experience. The main effect of this update was to give priority to websites that display well on smart devices.
The introduction of Mobilegeddon was a wake-up call for examining mobile traffic and considering the importance of setting up a mobile site or creating a responsive website. Initially, the web developers were under the notion that this update would harm their
websites but Google made it very clear that it won’t have any impact on PC users.
Mobilegeddon update gives more priority to a mobile-friendly website as mobile usage has been continuously surging. Google constantly strives to adapt its algorithm to new technologies.
Importance of Mobilegeddon
Do you know Google hasn’t named this update Mobilegeddon, it was named by some of the geek web developers? The original name was Armageddon. The web developer named it Mobilegeddon as it’s the last war between Google & non-mobile-friendly websites.
Coming to the facts, the Mobilegeddon update is not only for site-wide or domain-wide, but you also have to make every page of the website mobile-friendly otherwise it would take a toll on your website. Google won’t delist your website if it isn’t mobile-friendly instead it would penalize you.
With the Mobilegeddon update, Google is actively working to guide searchers on mobile devices to visit mobile-friendly sites. Google search engine will give thumbs up to the websites having a good design, easy user interface & most importantly easy viewable content wherein you won’t have to zoom in to read out the content.
This update helps mobile-friendly websites have a good ranking & improved traffic. In short, the websites optimized for mobile phones & tablets will see an increase in their overall performance in terms of traffic and revenue.
Impact on SEO
The Mobilegeddon update boosts pages in mobile search rankings worldwide if your web pages meet Google’s criteria for a positive experience.
So, if your website’s performance is based on keyword rankings, it would affect your rankings on SERP. You need to track each keyword twice i.e. once for desktop & once for mobile. This update is not about ranking a bunch of keywords, it’s about applying the technical algorithmic update to every page on your website.
For e-commerce sites, changes in algorithm mean changes in views, orders, and revenue. Mobilegeddon could have a positive or negative impact based on a site’s mobile friendliness. It might happen that some of your pages will rise and other pages would fall a few places due to mobile ranking adjustments but none would disappear from Google’s ranking.
You can check whether your website is mobile-friendly or not on Google’s Webmaster Tools. Go to Google’s mobile-friendly test in Webmaster tools and test representative pages in each template. The test for each page takes about 60 seconds to complete and returns with its results.
Here’s the link for checking the mobile friendliness of your website:
If a page fails, Google’s test result will list the reasons why your webpage failed & suggest resolving the issues. If your site is already responsive or you have a dedicated mobile site and still your web page fails in the test, the reason could be due to certain blocked files Google might not be able to crawl them. In that case, ask your developer to unblock those files so that Google can crawl them.
Conclusion
So, Google’s mobile-friendly update laid the base for the mobile search engine results page (SERP). It made people aware of the benefits of getting their site mobile-friendly and thus within a year rolled out its new update Mobilegeddon 2.0 in the year March 2016 to strengthen the mobile-friendly ranking signal.