Mobile Friendliness of Websites to Become a Ranking Signal for Google

The SEO articles and news sites are abuzz with the latest update on SEO provided by Google. In a recent announcement, Google has said that it would be increasing the emphasis on having mobile friendly websites going forward. In effect this means that Webmaster’s who have designed a mobile friendly website can expect their rankings in searches on Google to improve. And for the others, who are yet to build a mobile friendly website, can expect the ranks deteriorate.

The official rollout date for this update in the Google search engine algorithm is April 21, 2015. This mobile friendly algorithm runs on a page to page basis and on real-time.

How this affects the Webmasters:

• Naturally, the first effect will be on the rankings, either positive or negative depending on how mobile friendly the website is. Any website which is found to be user-friendly and adapts itself well on mobile devices of different screen sizes, will be rewarded by Google. On the other hand the ones which are difficult to read on a mobile device will be penalised and a drop in rankings is possible.
• Since the ranking signal will run on a real-time, the Webmasters can go ahead and change the webpages at any time. The ranking factors will start to improve as soon as Google notices this change and picks up the updated website in its index. Hence, they will have to do is wait till the next time the Google bot crawls the website. The drop in rankings if any will not be permanent and can be recovered fast
• The ranking signal considers the website on a page to page basis. Thus, Webmasters can expect a boost in ranking only for the pages which are mobile friendly. So, if the entire site is not compliant, then Webmasters can focus on the pages which are not compliant with the mobile guidelines provided by Google.

What Webmasters need to do?

As said earlier, many SEO articles and news sites are providing different viewpoints is to what the Webmasters need to do to become compliant with this latest update on SEO. Broadly, the following steps need to be taken by the Webmasters at this point of time.

• Analyse compliance: the first step is to analyse how mobile friendly the website is presently. Webmasters Can Use the "Fetch as Google" feature Google Webmasters tools to see how Google sees the page. Even Webmasters of mobile friendly websites can evaluate the degree of compliance with the Google guidelines. Pay special attention to the site loading speed.
• Re-engineering the non-compliant pages: Webmasters whose websites are partially or fully non-compliant need to modify the website on a page by page basis and try to become compliant by April 21. This can ensure that there is no intermediate drop in rankings due to this factor. If this is not possible, then they should aim to complete the work as soon as possible and wait for the crawler pick up the change and result in a recovery of rankings.