Mobile Friendly - What's changed?

[Shopclicks]

Has anyone noticed a website that is not 'mobile friendly' slip out of the top ten?

 

[William Crum]

Yes!

I notices that SERp of that website effected in mobile search results but not desktop results.

 

[fisicx]

No.

I've got sites built long before mobile was even an option and their ranking hasn't changed.

 

[Shopclicks]

Thought it might just be that no-one had told google au

 

[PipeTen-Carl]

Yes, but I don't have any quotable metrics. It appeared more that keyword competing sites which explicitly catered for mobiles received a boost, rather than the non-mobile friendly site receiving a penalty.

 

[Shopclicks]

I've noticed no change at all for any search I normally check. I'm seeing a non-mobile site in the top spot with 9 mobile friendly sites below for one search.

Are they giving sites 12 months to comply?

 

[OldWelshGuy]

I haven't seen any real changes. BUT (and this is a consideration),

Google have recently been bombarding webmasters with messages about blocked CSS & JS files, which tells me they ran a test and the SERP's were smelly pants, so they are trying to get webmasters to sort out their sites, before rolling out the change.

The change WILL come, but it will be a lot slower than google want it to be.

 

[fisicx]

Except the files aren't blocked, Google is just useless as fetching them. One of the files Google said was blocked was one of googles own. Not a lot I can do to fix that.

 

[OldWelshGuy]

Aye I know Google is smelly pants at pretty much anything these days

 

[Shopclicks]

Chin up

Now if you guys could just solve the U.S. invasion of .com.au page 1 serps problem, I'd appreciate it

A search for my best performing keyphrase shows 5/10 U.S. sites on page 1.

A search for the same term on .co.uk shows 2/10 on page 1. Which is where .com.au was a couple of months ago.

 

[OldWelshGuy]

Same here inn the UK., I am sick to death of having to go in and set it to 'UK sites only'. Google are CRAP, they are constantly ignoring my MANUAL setting of my location and my preferences, it is starting to pee me off. to the point I am considering ditching them.

 

[PipeTen-Carl]

Same here inn the UK., I am sick to death of having to go in and set it to 'UK sites only'. Google are CRAP, they are constantly ignoring my MANUAL setting of my location and my preferences, it is starting to pee me off. to the point I am considering ditching them.

For firefox: http://ready.to/search/en/ with "front of search term" of "http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&meta=cr=countryUK|countryGB&q="

 

[OldWelshGuy]

If google make me do that sort of thing, then they don't deserve my traffic.

 

[UKSBD]

This is how Google should be - http://www.sim64.co.uk/blog/alternative-search/

 

[MASSEY]

This is how Google should be - http://www.sim64.co.uk/blog/alternative-search/

You mean your website on top of every search?

 

[StevePoster]

Has anyone noticed a website that is not 'mobile friendly' slip out of the top ten?

No. I've got sites built long before mobile was even an option and their ranking hasn't changed.

It only proves that it doesn't matter whether your site is mobile friendly or not as long as the website is well established and performs well in the web it will not easily slip out.

 

[Andreas75]

Mobile searches almost doubled last year. Being mobile friendly helps not just for google rankings but for your User Experience. Some of my site was old-style and it was a huge job to make them responsive so I did create a Mobile version of the sites and rankings and traffic increased significantly.

 

[dineshjst]

While the mobile-friendly change is important, we still use a variety of signals to rank search results. 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 high if it has great content for the query

 

[AddPeople]

Having a mobile/responsive site will affect your rankings organically, not only that, the bounce rate will increase massively i.e. people won't stay on the website for long if they aren't having a good experience.

 

[fisicx]

Having a mobile/responsive site will affect your rankings organically....

Only for mobile searches. It won't affect desktop searches. It's all well documented in various Google papers and discussed on many SEO platforms.

 

[Shopclicks]

I see a bit of a layout change in mobile serps today. There was a line separating title and description earlier today, but that's gone. Now it's individual blocks for each result.

 

[AddPeople]

Only for mobile searches. It won't affect desktop searches. It's all well documented in various Google papers and discussed on many SEO platforms.

Sorry yes you're right, I didn't actually specify that it will affect mobile searches only.

 

[Shopclicks]

Sorry yes you're right, I didn't actually specify that it will affect mobile searches only.

Not seeing it yet though.

 

[fisicx]

Not seeing it yet though.

Me neither. still got a lot of non-mobile friendly site ranking well.

 

[Marcus Allen]

searchengineland .com documents this that there has been no significant change in terms of ranking mobile non mobile sites. and like what another user mentioned, forget Google what about your visitors I know I hate scrolling to view a webpage on my mobile i'm out straight away. thats one way it might affect your ranking is if you then start to get a high bounce rate then that may now serve as a negative ranking factor.

 

[sabian1982]

There have been some minimal changes but obviously this ranking signal is one of many impacting the way a website ranks... SSL being another recentish indicator that was introduced to improve rankings. Notably results on my phone vs desktop do vary, so seeing mobile friendly results from a mobile device is only to be expected.

Whether rankings go up or down is just one piece of the puzzle though... even if your traffic has stayed the same for X number of years I guarantee mobile traffic will be considerably higher. Looking at one of my sites for the last 30 days - 45% of traffic was from mobile, up from 35% the previous year and a mere 7% the year before that so quite a change in a 3 year period.

 

[Twinkle Toes]

It does make a difference. My site had been top of page one for five years, number two went mobile friendly and took the top spot and I was ranked second. I made a mobile version and within a few weeks was back at the top. Search results were the same from pc or mobile, not sure why you guys think it only effects mobile search's, the only difference I can see is on a mobile the search results tell you if a site is mobile friendly.

 

[Shopclicks]

Search results were the same from pc or mobile, not sure why you guys think it only effects mobile search's, the only difference I can see is on a mobile the search results tell you if a site is mobile friendly.

The change to mobile search results which kicked in on 21st April this year, was only supposed to affect results on mobile devices:

This update:

• Affects only search rankings on mobile devices

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com.au/2015/04/rolling-out-mobile-friendly-update.html

So, in theory, you could have a non-mobile friendly website dropped from page one mobile search results and still maintain a page one result on desktop for the same site and same search.

I'd say if that happened to you on mobile devices and desktop was also affected, that the change in ranking was possibly caused by some other factor. Possibly by something else that was changed to facilitate the mobile change on the competitors website. ie. they could have received a short-term boost from an overhaul of the site.

Others have said that they have seen changes in rankings on mobile, but I've yet to see a non-mobile site drop. One regular search I conduct has a non-mobile site in both 2nd and 3rd spot. Which is where they have always been.

 

[fisicx]

I'd say if that happened to you on mobile devices and desktop was also affected, that the change in ranking was possibly caused by some other factor.

100% agree with this.

 

[Twinkle Toes]

I'd say if that happened to you on mobile devices and desktop was also affected, that the change in ranking was possibly caused by some other factor. Possibly by something else that was changed to facilitate the mobile change on the competitors website. ie. they could have received a short-term boost from an overhaul of the site.

That would make sense.