What exactly has changed?
Some weeks ago, Google announced the following:
“We’ll start rolling out an update to mobile search results that increases the effect of the ranking signal to help our users find even more pages that are relevant and mobile-friendly.
If you’ve already made your site mobile-friendly, you will not be impacted by this update. If you need support with your mobile-friendly site, we recommend checking out the Mobile-Friendly Test and the Webmaster Mobile Guide, both of which provide guidance on how to improve your mobile site.
And remember, the intent of the search query is still a very strong signal — so even if a page with high quality content is not mobile-friendly, it could still rank well if it has great, relevant content.”
According to Google’s John Mueller, these changes are now fully rolled out. The change is supposed to rank mobile friendly pages better on mobile devices.
What do you have to do now?
Google’s mobile-friendly ranking algorithm is a page-level ranking signal. It does not affect your complete website. If some pages of your websites haven’t been optimised for mobile devices, they will not negatively affect the optimised pages on your site.
This Google algorithm update only affects searches from mobile devices – people who search from desktop computers won’t see a change.
It is important to make sure that your web pages are mobile-friendly. Fortunately, Google has a tool for this that is available here. Just enter the URL of your website and click the “Analyse” button.
If your website fails the test then you have to adjust the design of your web pages. Instead of creating a separate website for mobile devices, you could use responsive design for your web pages.
If you would like some advise on your website’s mobile performance and how to ensure your rankings are not affected, please contact us.
