Google To Give Mobile-Friendly Sites Another SEO Boost

Google has announced that they will boost the effects mobile-friendliness has on search rankings.

The update will happen at the beginning of May and “increases the effect of the [mobile-friendly] ranking signal” though if you are already mobile-friendly you will not be negatively impacted by this update.

Websites which are currently not mobile-friendly will not see a sudden, dramatic fall in traffic levels as Google will roll out the update gradually, though it’s not been confirmed if this will take weeks or months.

If some of this sounds familiar to readers it’s because almost 12 months ago in April 2015 Google first made mobile-friendliness a ranking factor, which caused some panic amongst website owners.

However, the weight Google put behind mobile-friendliness wasn’t quite as high as many feared and the impact on traffic rankings was not as big as expected.  Now, one year on, Google are boosting the signal and it could very well have a big impact.

Such was the panic in some quarters of mobile-friendliness first becoming a ranking signal that it was dubbed “Mobilegeddon” by SEOs and web owners.

Indeed, despite the slight anti-climax, a “study of consumer activity on branded sites from Q2 2014 to Q2 2015 conducted by Adobe found that organic traffic to sites with low mobile engagement fell by as much as 10 percent in the first few months following the change in Google’s algorithm,” according to NewsFactor.

The likelihood over time is that mobile-friendliness will continue to become a bigger and bigger ranking factor for Search Engines. Web traffic from mobile devices is growing faster than from any other source and will soon eclipse traffic from desktops and laptops, making it more important than ever to stay ahead of the curve and make your website mobile-friendly.

If you do not know whether your website is mobile-friendly or not, simply input your URL into the Google mobile-friendly tool and it will quickly determine if the site qualifies as mobile-friendly.

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