Upcoming Mobile Friendly Ranking Signal Update
Google's launching a mobile friendly ranking signal April 21, 2015. According to Search Engine Round Table's Barry Schwartz, at SMX Munich, Google Webmaster Analyst Zineb Ait Bahajji said this algorithm update will be bigger than either Google's Panda penalty (this is the content penalty - thin, poor, misleading or duplicate content) or the Penguin algorithm penalty (shady link schemes, over-optimized anchor text).
This only affects mobile search results, not desktop. To recap, for the last year or so Google has been emphasizing to web masters that we all need to have a robust, mobile-friendly web site in addition to the desk top version.
Around the first of this year, Google began annotating in mobile search results those sites that are "mobile friendly." Last week, in a very unusual, very un-Google like move, the search engine announce that as of April 21, 2015, mobile ranking signals would be incorporated into the search algorithm and rolled out at large. I wrote about it here.
So now is the time to put your web designer butt in gear and get ready for this launch. If you haven't considered a mobile version, this is the year to do it, the sooner the better.
Considering that mobile searches are now about 50% of all searches, this will be huge. I realize it's only about a month away, but if you begin planning now, you can probably roll out a mobile version of at least your most important pages around April 21, which will be better than nothing.
By the way...there are some really common SEO issues with mobile-friendly websites. My wonderful SEO colleague Scott Benson stays on top of these things. Here's a great blog post that lists five really common technical SEO issues and the fixes for them that was published by Benson SEO.
You make your site mobile-friendly with responsive web design - read more about it here.
Need to know more about mobile SEO? Take an SEO training class from Invenio and get the most up to date search engine optimization skills, knowledge and techniques to whip your web site into shape.
You can learn how to do SEO in our online training course.
Until we meet again, keep it between the ditches!
All the very best to you,
Nancy McDonald