Google’s Mobile Friendly Roll Out is Approaching!

Next Tuesday, April 21, 2015, is the day a lot of search engine practitioners have marked on their calendars. Today is the day when Google has decided to roll out a new mobile friendly algorithm.  What does that mean for all of our websites?

• The roll out will being on April 21st and will take some time to complete.There is no grey area… either the site is mobile friendly or it’s not.
  • To see if your site is user friendly, check out this tool from Google Developers.
• The rollout will be on a page-by-page and real-time basis.
  • Page-by-page basis is an important note for sites that don’t have a 100% mobile-friendly site. Meaning, if the site has 10 pages but only 5 of them are mobile-friendly, only the pages that are mobile-friendly will benefit. (Searchengineland.com)
  • Although Google has not clarified the terms of ‘real-time,’ there are assumptions that it’s whenever Google crawls and indexes the page.

If you are wondering what difference it makes if the site isn’t mobile friendly, here are some issues you may be facing in the near future:

• Rankings will decrease drastically.
• Faulty redirects.
• There will be no indication if the site is mobile friendly on search results pages before the meta description.
• Increase in bounce rates.

To our knowledge, this is the first time Google has released a date for an algorithm upgrade. With that being said, we should all take this update seriously. Reports have stated that webmasters will notice changes on their rankings if their site is not mobile friendly, a quicker influence than what we have seen with Panda or Penguin.

If you are concerned about whether your site is mobile friendly, give us a call. We can evaluate your site and offer some solutions!