SEO Tips 2015: Get Ready for MobileGeddon April 21 2015

On April 21, Google will begin rolling out Mobilegeddon, a major algorithm change that will expand Google’s use of mobile readiness and friendliness as a ranking signal in search.

This algorithm update is likely to have more of an impact on search rankings than either Penguin or Panda, two of the largest search algorithm updates, with the most impact, Google has launched.

Here’s how to get ready for Mobilegeddon.

Sites that are mobile-friendly will be rewarded with better positioning in Google’s search-engine results. That means mobile-responsive websites will see more traffic from a rapidly expanding base — those using cell phones and tablets.

Those that don’t have a mobile version of their site in place by April 21 will see their search ranking demoted — meaning less mobile organic traffic — forcing sites to rely on a shrinking desktop-based audience.

Mobile-friendliness will only impact mobile rankings, not those for desktops. Even though desktop and mobile search engine results pages (SERPs) look very different, if a site is No. 1 on desktop, it’s likely to be No. 1 on mobile.

After April 21, this may no longer be the case. In fact, it probably won’t be.

In Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers’ 2014 Internet Trends Report, mobile use continues to rise rapidly, taking up 25 percent of the total web use, up from 14 percent the year before. The report also says that shipment of tablets, up 52 percent in 2013, is growing faster than PCs ever did.

If implementing a mobile strategy has been low on your website to-do list, the upcoming April 21 deadline means now is the time to move migrating to a top priority.

Google offers two tools to determine if your site is mobile-friendly. The Mobile-Friendly Test will analyze your web page URL and whether your site meets initial qualifications. The Mobile Usability Report inside your Google Webmaster Tools examines your website as Google sees it and provides a list of mobile-usability issues.

Responsive design, which uses the same HTML code on the same URL regardless of the device but can render the display differently based on the screen size, is Google’s recommended design platform (though it does not have a ranking benefit). Other options include dynamic serving, which uses the same URL regardless of the device but generates a different version of HTML for each different device type based on what the server knows about the user’s browser, and separate URLs (or having a separate hosted mobile version of your site), which uses different code for each device and the configuration tries to detect the users’ device and redirect them to the appropriate page.

Make sure that Google’s mobile bot, or Googlebot, can crawl the content on your site. Crawling is the process by which Googlebot discovers new and updated pages to be added to the Google index. It’s like the philosophical thought experiment “If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?” If Goggle can’t see your site, it’s like your site is not there to anyone else. If you are blocking elements, such as CSS and javascript, your site will not pass Google’s mobile-friendly test, even if everything else on the site passes. So you need to allow Googlebot to crawl both CSS and javascript to pass.

Tip: Check each individual page of your site on a mobile device to ensure navigability. Just because your home page is mobile-friendly doesn’t mean the rest of your site is. Googles mobile-friendliness is determined on a page-by-page basis and runs in real time. So passing some or even most pages as mobile-friendly will not mean your entire site passes the muster. All pages must be mobile-friendly to receive the Google label on mobile searches (this label doesn’t appear on desktop searches). That said, any mobile-ready page can benefit from the update, and an entire site won’t be demoted simply because a few pages aren’t mobile-friendly.