7 April 2015

Extra, extra read all about it!!! Is your website ready for Google’s algorithm update?

07 April 2015
The biggest update in years. Call it what you want: On April 21 Google will be releasing an update to its algorithm that could have a big impact on your search engine rankings if you and your website aren’t prepared. What is a mobile-friendly site? Thankfully, it’s pretty easy to find out. Just run your website through Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test page keep in mind the mobile friendly test is generally a useful gauge of a site’s mobile performance.

Google will launch a new mobile crawler (probably with an Android user-agent) that can do a better job of crawling single-page web apps, Android apps, and maybe even Deep Links in iOS apps. The new Mobile-Friendly guidelines that launched last month focus on exposing JS and CSS because Android apps are built in Java, and single-page web apps rely heavily on JavaScript for their fluid, app-like experience.

The Algorithm Assesses Each Page Individually

A notable feature of the mobile algorithm is that it analyzes mobile compatibility on a page-by-page basis, rather than a website-wide basis. This announcement came from Google’s Gary Illyes during his SMX West presentation and was reported by Search Engine Land. What does this mean practically? If your site has some mobile-optimized pages, but some non-optimized pages, then Google will look at them separately and promote the one that is optimized. They won’t “penalize” (if that’s the right term) an entire site based on the off chance that a few pages aren’t optimized.

Realistically, though, if a site is responsive and well-designed, then this shouldn’t be too much of an issue. I’m sure there are some sites with a few optimized pages and a few that aren’t, but generally speaking, an entire site is either mobile friendly or not. Google can only assess a site’s mobile friendliness when it crawls the page and indexes it for search. At this point, your site is scored. If the page is not mobile friendly on April 21, but becomes mobile-friendly on April 25, then we can assume that Google’s next crawl should be able to identify it as such.

Already, we know that this update will be bigger than Panda or Penguin. We also know that Google considers mobile to be so significant that they are working to dominate nearly all of its manifestations. With this search update, we should brace ourselves for a tectonic adjustment in the way that mobile search functions.

Some of the experts are making the following basic predictions. That non-optimized pages will virtually drop from mobile rankings and possibly desktop rankings. Some are predicting that any page lacking mobile optimization will cease to rank for head terms. Some are also predicting that SERP results on page 1 for longtail keywords above a certain search frequency threshold will feature mobile-friendly only pages.

If you’ve been hanging on to your old-school website design for the past decade, Google has officially given you a reason to upgrade in the next two weeks. If your site isn’t mobile-friendly, don’t panic, and definitely don’t pay someone from a spammy-looking “Your website is in danger” email to fix your site.

The focus of this update is to provide a better search experience for mobile users. To accomplish this, Google will be “expanding its use of mobile-friendliness as a ranking signal.” So what does that mean in plain English? If your website isn’t mobile-friendly, your search engine rankings and ultimately your Web traffic could take a hit. So definitely run your website through Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test.

A new mobile-only index to go with the new crawler also makes sense because Google wants to index and rank both app content and deep links to screens in apps, but it does not necessarily want to figure them into the desktop algorithm or slow it down with content that should never rank in a desktop search. We also think that the recent increased focus on deep links and the announcement from Google about Google Play’s new automated and manual review process are related. This announcement indicates, almost definitively, that Google has built a crawler that is capable of crawling Android apps. We believe that this new crawler will also be able to index more than one content rendering (web page or app screen data-set) to one URL/URI and it will probably will focus more on feeds, schema and sitemaps for its own efficiency.

Responsive design, not separate sites for mobile devices. Google has stated in the past that it prefers responsive design over other solutions. Redesigning a website can hurt existing search engine rankings if not done carefully. Any links with long-standing high rankings can disappear if a URL structure is incorrectly changed. Inbound links, an important ranking factor, can also be impacted in a redesign. Previous experience transitioning sites is important to retain any existing search authority.

Once you’ve gone through a site redesign, or any time you make tweaks to your site, it’s important to run through every page of your site and make sure links are working and pages are loading properly. Run through it on a smartphone or tablet if you can, to avoid all punishment from Google on April 21. Now, you can focus on adding relevant, local content to your website to climb the search engine rankings even further.

What’s Good For Desktop Is Also Good For Mobile…Sort Of

An additional insight from Google’s John Mueller is that Google mixes some of the desktop and mobile ranking signals. Page speed, for example, is blended in its impact on both desktop and mobile search. Additionally, it seems true that Google’s top heavy algorithm also shares the desktop/mobile impact.

We can safely assume that some of the features that are good for desktop are equally good for mobile, assuming the page has a mobile-friendly design. But keep in mind that the algorithm may begin to differentiate the various factors that are currently bundled as one and the same. Because of the vastly different platforms, load time, layout, etc., between desktop and mobile, it would make sense for it to do so. “Mobile-Friendly” designation in mobile SERPS may be temporary, as long as SEOs and webmasters feel incentivized to make their CSS and JavaScript crawlable, and get into the new mobile index. “Mobile-Friendly” in the SERP is a bit clunky, and takes up a lot of space, so Google may decide switch to something else, like the “slow” tag shown to the right, originally spotted in testing by Barry Schwartz.

In conclusion this 4/21 change will be bigger than the Panda and Penguin updates. Again, we think this fits well with an infrastructure change. It is unclear if all mobile devices will be impacted in the change or not. The change might be more impactful for Android devices or might impact Android and iOS devices equally—though currently we are seeing significant differences between iOS and Android for some types of search results, with more significant changes happening on Android than on iOS.

Sources: SEL, Inman, The Moz Blog

Nexonta Technologies Inc