So here we are, again dancing on the Google tunes and making web a better place! Many have just recovered from the wrath of Google Panda and Penguin and it seems the era of Mobilegeddon has begun. As per the declaration by google it started the roll-out on 21st April 2015. It has been 7 days since the update has started its effect on the global SERP’s and websites.
The Google Mobile Friendly Update aka Mobilegeddon Facts:
- It started on 21st April 2015
- It affects the website ranking on mobile searches only (tablets search are not affected)
- You can google your website name and check out for the “Mobile Friendly” label in your listing
- You can check your website mobile score via mobile friendly testing tool by Google.
- It is not a site wide update, it’s done on a page-by-page basis. So even if your website contains some non-mobile friendly pages the mobile friendly pages will be rewarded.
- Unlike other updates Mobile Friendly Update is run in real time.
- As of now, only the core serp’s are affected, other products like maps, news, local etc. are not affected.
- It is more significant than panda & penguin and is expected to affect 11% of the search results that a lot more than panda and penguin.
- Relevancy remains the top factor for ranking. i.e. brand queries are not affected much
- Mobile website loading time is not considered to affect rankings for now.
- Google Confirms the mobile friendly update is live, but not on all data centers.
- Considering that it is a real-time update even if your rankings are affected they are expected to recover as soon as google caches the changes made on your website.
Note: Some Mobile SERP changes can heavily affect your organic CTR- you can learn more about it in our another post Google SERP’s Start Reflecting the Mobilegeddon Update
Google Declared: In just the two months since we announced this change, we’ve seen a 4.7 percentage point uptick in the proportion of sites that are mobile friendly, and we hope to see even more in the coming months.
The Mobilegeddon Effect:
A lot of people have been tracking the effect of mobile friendly update after rollout and it does not seem to be very aggressive. Though, we cannot say when one could see a major shift in the mobile SERP’s as well as their mobile website rankings.
Dr.Pete from Moz has been analyzing the update and its outcomes, his analysis shows that even if Google declared the date 21st April for the update, the actual big day was 22nd April. On this day the number of websites with “mobile friendly” label jumped up to 72.3% and has been showing a slow gradual improvement since then.
Marcus Tober, SearchMetrics has been analyzing the early losers and gainer when the update rolled out. It should be noted that many websites mentioned in the list may have been updated to a mobile friendly version now. You can do a little analysis yourself and yes, don’t forget to let us know!
Mobile Friendly Update Top Losers:
The ratio of Mobile Rankings vs. Desktop Rankings has been taken into account so as to measure the difference in performance for mobile & desktop rankings. The lower the ratio, the worse is this domain ranking in Mobile compared to Desktop.
| Domain | Mobile SEO Visibility actual | loss in % | Ratio Mobile vs Desktop |
| reddit.com | 874108 | -27% | -36% |
| nbcsports.com | 139213 | -28% | -40% |
| songlyrics.com | 111042 | -26% | -47% |
| youngmoney.com | 10602 | -76% | -77% |
| fool.com | 78599 | -27% | -49% |
| isitdownrightnow.com | 83067 | -25% | -49% |
| tested.com | 3243 | -89% | -18% |
| sidereel.com | 88851 | -22% | -44% |
| census.gov | 71234 | -23% | -53% |
| onlinecreditcenter2.com | 33026 | -38% | -39% |
| odir.us | 75586 | -21% | -15% |
| boxofficemojo.com | 39951 | -33% | -64% |
| schoolloop.com | 50046 | -27% | -50% |
| interviewmagazine.com | 42280 | -31% | -32% |
| locatetv.com | 65460 | -21% | -53% |
| fnfismd.com | 54730 | -23% | -30% |
| etymonline.com | 25169 | -39% | -77% |
| reviewjournal.com | 22769 | -41% | -40% |
| thinkexist.com | 15514 | -49% | -68% |
| sciencedaily.com | 45017 | -23% | -45% |
| majorgeeks.com | 40374 | -24% | -53% |
| movie25.ag | 16324 | -44% | -43% |
| thefind.com | 2448 | -84% | -49% |
| megashare.sc | 48082 | -20% | -64% |
| walmartstores.com | 27157 | -31% | -31% |
| thefiscaltimes.com | 4940 | -71% | -81% |
| brassring.com | 38315 | -24% | -46% |
| google.es | 5830 | -67% | -26% |
| epguides.com | 32037 | -27% | -53% |
| krebsonsecurity.com | 10451 | -52% | -42% |
| sheppardsoftware.com | 39140 | -22% | -55% |
| upworthy.com | 17146 | -38% | -26% |
| jobs.net | 34174 | -23% | -31% |
| apples4theteacher.com | 30268 | -25% | -34% |
| mmo-champion.com | 2948 | -78% | -77% |
| webcrawler.com | 36291 | -21% | -36% |
| moreofit.com | 35610 | -21% | -46% |
| hid.im | 14776 | -40% | -43% |
| webs.com | 9237 | -51% | -54% |
| ft.com | 27984 | -25% | -42% |
| paroles-musique.com | 15220 | -37% | -62% |
| jcpportraits.com | 14936 | -37% | -32% |
| lottostrategies.co | 2717 | -76% | -63% |
| searchbug.com | 8885 | -49% | -17% |
| usps.gov | 33186 | -20% | -25% |
| ondvdreleases.com | 4058 | -68% | -17% |
| barchart.com | 10435 | -44% | -55% |
| genealogybank.com | 26451 | -24% | -53% |
| sketchup.com | 18633 | -30% | -19% |
| zeropaid.com | 2550 | -76% | -74% |
| edx.org | 13439 | -37% | -30% |
Mobile Friendly Update Top Gainers:
Here too, we have the Ratio Mobile vs Desktop. The higher the ratio the better are the domain rankings in Mobile than in Desktop.
| Domain | Mobile SEO Visibility actual | gain in % | Ratio Mobile vs Desktop |
| tvtropes.org | 290528 | 420% | 23% |
| foreignaffairs.com | 153528 | 771% | 37% |
| gq.com | 178364 | 67% | 19% |
| w3snoop.com | 104573 | 91% | 108% |
| knowyourmeme.com | 153154 | 32% | 13% |
| bandcamp.com | 272302 | 13% | 12% |
| fbschedules.com | 133754 | 31% | 11% |
| washingtontimes.com | 173354 | 21% | 12% |
| ipaddress.com | 89830 | 51% | 71% |
| imgur.com | 118307 | 32% | 24% |
| free-tv-video-online.info | 71972 | 65% | 38% |
| quora.com | 251746 | 13% | 28% |
| lyricsmania.com | 229221 | 14% | 12% |
| foreignpolicy.com | 56583 | 83% | 18% |
| wtvr.com | 43562 | 124% | 67% |
| sports-reference.com | 58155 | 65% | 10% |
| refinery29.com | 100977 | 29% | 19% |
| macmillandictionary.com | 150033 | 17% | 12% |
| hitfix.com | 75004 | 42% | 28% |
| zacks.com | 87375 | 33% | 14% |
| motherjones.com | 200106 | 12% | 14% |
| dslreports.com | 82131 | 32% | 28% |
| allposters.com | 67786 | 39% | 11% |
| rt.com | 89352 | 26% | 10% |
| easycounter.com | 38134 | 87% | 15% |
| change.org | 89739 | 23% | 11% |
| newrepublic.com | 129003 | 15% | 15% |
| boostmobile.com | 54172 | 40% | 11% |
| stream-tv1.net | 18126 | 548% | 151% |
| newsweek.com | 110915 | 16% | 17% |
| iconosquare.com | 93694 | 19% | 31% |
| watch-series-tv.to | 65776 | 28% | 13% |
| websta.me | 112232 | 14% | 23% |
| 800-numbers.net | 76397 | 22% | 23% |
| hypestat.com | 30643 | 81% | 172% |
| pcgamer.com | 77815 | 21% | 24% |
| nybooks.com | 95426 | 16% | 20% |
| advanceautoparts.com | 90342 | 17% | 25% |
| radio.com | 53584 | 32% | 11% |
| newmexicocriminallaw.com | 13363 | 4012% | 30% |
| mp3skull.to | 35886 | 56% | 143% |
| religionfacts.com | 24257 | 107% | 24% |
| thinkprogress.org | 64598 | 22% | 20% |
| wikimedia.org | 92805 | 15% | 28% |
| microcenter.com | 41385 | 39% | 13% |
| kochdavis.com | 14444 | 408% | 181% |
| mixcloud.com | 32295 | 56% | 89% |
| topix.com | 114888 | 11% | 12% |
| fox2now.com | 35422 | 42% | 23% |
| kcci.com | 24271 | 75% | 64% |
| grist.org | 20662 | 100% | 30% |
| stemfireandems.com | 10752 | 2072% | 49% |
| shazam.com | 30850 | 45% | 103% |
| eurogamer.net | 45327 | 26% | 49% |
So, these were the early losers and gainers for the mobilegeddon. We can assume that 2015 is the year of mobile updates and the web is going to evolve again after panda and penguin. Below we have put in some suggestion for a better mobile friendly website.
Changes other than rankings:
Its not only the rankings that are changing, Google is also changing the way SERP’s are shown on mobile. The changes are not limited to design, google also announced that mobile url will consist of breadcrumbs and they maybe dropping domain in the mobile results. We have noticed the shift for breadcrumbs:
Finally! The takeaways:
If you are new to all this, we understand its a bit tough to get all this into our heads properly. So, to help you overcome this dilemma of yours we have mentioned below some suggestions which you can follow:
Keep the headlines short and specific- You can ask yourself, how will this title look on twitter?
Use Clean URL’s– Google has started to roll-out breadcrumbs for mobile results, in this case you would like to have your breadcrumbs properly structured.
Schema Structure– Update your website with the schema structure, it can help improve relevancy, navigation and generate more engagement. Moreover the search engines love them 🙂
Keep your paragraphs short– Your will not love to read a lot of lengthy content on smaller screens. So keep it concise, specific and properly distributed.
Clear Call-to-actions– Keep the call to action distinct and easy to identify. Ensure that a conversion can be easily made by your mobile audience.
Optimize you content– Having short content is not enough, optimize it for higher relevancy. You can consider writing short meta that stand out, proper integration of important keywords in content, SEO friendly headlines, alt text for the images, etc.
We should not forget that google also has many other ranking signals other than mobile-friendly websites. The non-mobile friendly websites will not disappear from the SERP’s and may rank higher if their content provides a greater value to the user.
To keep winning we suggest you to focus on what your user needs. Understand the search engine updates and keeping them in mind try to align your website with your business and audience.
Conclusion:
The Google Mobile Friendly Update aka mobilegeddon has begun. Google did declare the data 21st April for the update roll-out, but the overall feedback stands low as per various analysis by different people of the industry. But, we cannot say when google starts the game, i think, the update maybe bigger than most have expected it to be. For now, we stand the test of time, we will only know the real data & stats once everything settles down.
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[…] So here we are, again dancing on the Google tunes and making web a better place! Many have just recovered from the wrath of Google Panda and Penguin and it seems the era of Mobilegeddon has begun. As per the declaration by google it started the roll-out on 21st April 2015. […]