Even clinging to the once towering bridge, the only thing Kayce could see was desert. Yesterday, San Francisco hummed with life, but now there was nothing but the hot hiss of the wind. Google’s Mobilegeddon blew out from Mountain View like Death’s last exhale, and for the first time since she regained consciousness, Kayce wondered if she was the last SEO left alive.
We have a penchant for melodrama, and the blogosphere loves a conspiracy, but after weeks of speculation bordering on hysteria, it’s time to see what the data has to say about Google’s Mobile Update. If you've been following MozCast, you may be unimpressed with this particular apocalypse:
The purple bars all occurred after the pre-announced roll-out date (April 21st). Temperatures hit 66.1°F on the first official day of Google's Mobile Update (the system is tuned to an average of 70°F), and stayed low until April 24th. The problem is that this system only measures desktop temperatures, and as we know, Google's Mobile Update should only impact mobile SERPs. So, we decided to build a MozCast Mobile, that would separately track mobile SERPs (Android, specifically) across the same 10K keyword set. Here's what we saw for the past 10 days on MozCast Mobile:
Across the board, mobile temperatures run a little hotter (which could just be quirks in how we measure). On April 21st, mobile temps were slightly higher, but nothing to write home about. So far, Day 2 (April 22nd) has shown the hottest temperatures, hitting 79.8°F. Interestingly, the difference between desktop and mobile flux was almost 18° on Day 2. There's another small spike on April 24th, but as you an see from the first graph, that spike also impacted desktop rankings. Whatever happened that day doesn't appear to be related to any kind of mobile algorithm update.
Since building MozCast Mobile, we've also been tracking how many page-1 URLs show the "Mobile-friendly" tag. Presumably, if mobile-friendly results are rewarded, we'd expect that number to jump and then stay higher. Here's that stat back to April 18th:
Even before April 21st, a surprisingly high number of the URLs we track carried the "Mobile-friendly" tag. We don't have a lot of historical data, but the low point was around 66.3% (on April 8th). That number has steadily crept up since then, but it's unclear whether this is an algorithmic change, data being updated by Google, or sites being updated last-minute to be more mobile friendly. Please note that the Y-axis on this graph is restricted (50-75%) to help better visualize the gradual increase over time.
On April 22nd, the number of sites with "Mobile-friendly" tagging bumped up to 72.3%, and it's crept up slightly since then (currently at 72.8%). Again, we can't really determine the cause for this increase, but, one way or another, Google seems to be getting what they wanted
Tracking a long roll-out
Although Google has repeatedly cited April 21st, they've also said that this update could take days or weeks. If an update is spread out over weeks, can we accurately measure the flux? The short answer is: not very well. We can measure flux over any time-span, but search results naturally change over time – we have no real guidance to tell us what's normal over longer periods.
The "Mobile-friendly" tag tracking is one solution – this should gradually increase – but there's another metric we can look at. If mobile results continue to diverge from desktop results, then the same-day flux between the two sets of results should increase. In other words, mobile results should get increasingly different from desktop results with each day of the roll-out. Here's what that cross-flux looks like:
I'm using raw flux data here, since the temperature conversion isn't calibrated to this data. This comparison is tricky, because many sites use different URLs for mobile vs. desktop. I've stripped out the obvious cases ("m." and "mobile." sub-domains), but that still leaves a lot of variants.
Although April 21st was quiet, we did see a decent bump around Day 2 (April 22nd), which matches our other data. This divergence has continued, but not dramatically. It appears something did change around April 22nd, but the impact isn't what any of us probably expected.
Tracking potential losers
No major sites are reporting hits yet, but by looking at the "Mobile-friendly" tag for the top domains in MozCast Mobile, we can start to piece together who might get hit by the update. Here are the top 20 domains (in our 10K data set) as of April 21st, along with the percent of their ranking URLs that are tagged as mobile-friendly:
- en.m.wikipedia.org — 96.3%
- www.amazon.com — 62.3%
- m.facebook.com — 100.0%
- m.yelp.com — 99.9%
- m.youtube.com — 27.8%
- twitter.com — 99.8%
- www.tripadvisor.com — 92.5%
- www.m.webmd.com — 100.0%
- mobile.walmart.com — 99.5%
- www.pinterest.com — 97.5%
- www.foodnetwork.com — 69.9%
- www.ebay.com — 97.7%
- www.mayoclinic.org — 100.0%
- m.allrecipes.com — 97.1%
- m.medlineplus.gov — 100.0%
- www.bestbuy.com — 90.2%
- www.overstock.com — 98.6%
- m.target.com — 41.4%
- www.zillow.com — 99.6%
- www.irs.gov — 0.0%
I've bolded any site under 75% – the IRS is our big Top 20 trouble spot, although don't expect IRS.gov to stop ranking at tax-time soon. Interestingly, YouTube's mobile site only shows as mobile-friendly about a quarter of the time in our data set – this will be a key case to watch. Note that Google could consider a site mobile-friendly without showing the "Mobile-friendly" tag, but it's the simplest/best proxy we have right now.
As of April 28th, there was no major movement in the top 20, with the exception of some immediate position swaps (ex. #7 with #8), but these are fairly common. YouTube actually gained SERP share slightly (although it's still in #5 in our data). The IRS did fall a couple of positions (to #23), but tax season is also drawing to a close, and movement beyond the top 20 is pretty common.
Changes beyond rankings
It's important to note that, in many ways, mobile SERPs are already different from desktop SERPs. The most striking difference is design, but that's not the only change. For examples, Google recently announced that they would be dropping domains in mobile display URLs. Here's a sample mobile result from my recent post:
Notice the display URL, which starts with the brand name ("Moz") instead of our domain name. That's followed by a breadcrumb-style URL that uses part of the page name. Expect this to spread, and possibly even hit desktop results in the future.
While Google has said that vertical results wouldn't change with the April 21st update, that statement is a bit misleading when it comes to local results. Google already uses different styles of local pack results for mobile, and those pack results appear in different proportions. For example, here's a local "snack pack" on mobile (Android):
Snack packs appear in only 1.5% of the local rankings we track for MozCast Desktop, but they're nearly 4X as prevalent (6.0%) on MozCast Mobile (for the same keywords and locations). As these new packs become more prevalent, they take away other styles of packs, and create new user behavior. So, to say local is the same just because the core algorithm may be the same is misleading at best.
Finally, mobile adds entirely new entities, like app packs on Android (from a search for "jobs"):
These app packs appear on a full 8.4% of the mobile SERPs we're tracking, including many high-volume keywords. As I noted in my recent post, these app packs also consume page-1 organic slots.
A bit of good news
If you're worried that you may be too late to the mobile game, it appears there is some good news. Google will most likely reprocess new mobile-friendly pages quickly. Just this past few days, Moz redesigned our blog to be mobile friendly. In less than 24 hours, some of our main blog pages were already showing the "Mobile-friendly" tag:
However big this update ultimately ends up being, Google's push toward mobile-first design and their clear public stance on this issue strongly signal that mobile-friendly sites are going to have an advantage over time.
One other bit of good news: we are actively exploring mobile rank-tracking for Moz Analytics. More details are in this Q&A from MA's Product Manager, Jon White.
Stay tuned to this post (same URL) for the next week or two - I'll be updating charts and data as the Mobile Update continues to roll out. If the update really does take days or weeks, we'll do our best to measure the long-term impact and keep you informed.
Superb work Pete. I know you worked incredibly long and hard to build a mobile Mozcast for this event and that data-wrangling has been a royal pain. Interesting to see that this update was so tiny in comparison to other things we've tracked that Google's never even talked about. I've been a constant skeptic about this update for three reasons:
I said yesterday: I'll bet my beard that Facebook's April 21st changes have a bigger long-term impact than Google's #Mobilegeddon. Given your data here, I'm sticking to that :-)
I'm not sure this one is over, but it's anyone's guess right now. If this ends up being a blip on the radar, I think it's time to take Google to task for their FUD campaigns. The MSM was all over this one, and many people made major site changes (including us).
and when we are on major changes - i cant thumb up when i am scrolled down into the comment area. I just can give a thumb up when i am in post area.
So - I also cant click any of these buttons --------------------->
when I am down here in comment section. A change of the z-index helped, but it went a bit to the right. Latest Chrome version.
I also have some sites, where I still work on a mobile update, one wich has a huge amount of mobile traffic. I am interested in
It was a client, he decided to late to make the change - now I am very exited :)
Hmm, that's strange -- the buttons follow me down into the comments, and I'm also using the latest version of Chrome. Is it still happening for you? Would love to make sure that gets fixed, as we're addressing a short list of issues that cropped up with the new blog soon. Thanks for the help!
Sorry Trevor -
it still is happening here. But not on each post, some posts work fine, this one not. Nearly equal problem in Firefox, but in FF I can thumb up and tweet, but FB & G+ are not useable.
Keep the beard. Leave the mustache.
70% of mobile searches had the mobile friendly tag already - reminds us that this is not Google's first foray into making mobile search better. I still would have expected a bigger jump in SERP's but the point about high quality content is very valid indeed.
Just a few days ago before the update was rolled out, Google's Garry Illies quoted at Brighton SEO that 70% of pages on the web are mobile friendly. It's incredible to see this percentage being identical to the mobile-friendly pages on page one you guys have reported.
That is nice to hear. Our Knowledge Graph number is really close to the number that Steven Levy got from Google, too, so I hope we're on the right track. Was that number from Brighton quoted anywhere online?
So you'd bet your beard... LOL... Did you sweat for at least a moment?
Since I don't use Facebook... their change will have zero impact on me long or short term. :p
I dont either but I will have to worry about how many of my employer's customers / potential customers use facebook.
Mobile phone users use the internet differently than tablet and desktop users. Smartphone users want short quick information primarily from digital media sites, while tablet and desktop users are more prepared to spend some time searching the whole web and reading online.
Google has long been a powerhouse of Internet search on desktop and laptop computers… but on mobile devices it has found the going much tougher. In the mobile realm, people tend to reach services through apps and app stores, rather than through an all-purpose search engine.
In 2014, Google's chunk of mobile search revenue fell to 68 percent, down from 83 percent just two years earlier, according to eMarketer. So the company is now making efforts to boost its appeal to the millions of people wielding smartphones.
While Responsive Web Design does optimize the user experience across devices, it does not provide a user experience as rich as the Mobile Web App approach. And a Responsive design on desktop and tablet often sacrifices esthetics for utility.
Businesses which rely on mobile traffic will certainly need to have mobile friendly websites. However, if traffic to a site comes mainly via desktop/tablet, there is less urgency to be mobile-friendly.
As you mentioned: "To use Google's words: "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." I don't think they'll sacrifice showing useful, high quality information, just because a mobile user has to pinch-and-zoom. I'm a hyperactive mobile searcher, and in my opinion, the UX of even mobile-unfriendly sites isn't particularly bad on most modern smartphones."
"if traffic to a site comes mainly via desktop/tablet, there is less urgency to be mobile-friendly."
My site only gets 5% mobile traffic according to Google Analytics so I have postponed setting my own site up for mobile -- too busy with client sites. I've set up 5 so far and not seeing any noticeable change.
One more reason to stand with you Rand is Google said brand search queries won't affect much SERPs as brand websites are the most relevant and no point to remove it for branded keywords. :)
Great analysis Pete! Looking forward to seeing future updates as Google rolls out this update.
For folks that are wondering, when Moz launched our mobile-friendly blog, we immediately performed a "Fetch and Render" in Google's Webmaster Tools using Google's Mobile Smartphone crawler. All pages were then submitted to the index.
All in all, it took 12-18 hours for the "Mobile-friendly" tag to begin appearing in mobile search results. Not sure if submitting the pages to Google's index sped things along, but we recommend it to folks whenever they make significant changes to pages that you want to get indexed quickly.
Nice work as usual Peter! I think many were expecting massive changes right away...not sure why though, Google made it clear way back nearly two months ago that the update would roll out over weeks or more...One question I do have that no one seems to be able to answer for me is what impact this MAY have on desktop serps for sites that get a lot of mobile traffic....let's say a site gets 40% of its traffic from Mobile, then it is not mobile friendly and gets knocked from the mobile serps...isn't it logical to assume that the drop in CTR/bounce/etc COULD translate to lower desktop rankings?>
Curious to hear others thoughts on this...
Cheers!
That's an interesting point, and anybody's guess right now. If the user signals are unified, then mobile CTR definitely could impact desktop, in theory. Generally, though, Google looks at CTR in a position-agnostic way (at least, that's my understanding), so the impact may be minimal.
Stephen - I think this is a great point, but as Pete said, it likely wouldn't be the queries/clicks usage data that impacts. However, if you don't rank in mobile and you were earning social shares and word-of-mouth and links and other forms of amplification from even a small sliver of that traffic you've lost, that would certainly translate to lower desktop rankings (or, at least, less ability to compete in earning the same signals as competitors) over time.
Do you think it's a possibility that Google isn't very concerned about YouTube being mobile friendly, because they are trying to encourage users to use the mobile app instead of a browser ?
O my God, This is the end!
And the principle for a great business opportunity...
Hi I am Vikas Singh Gusain, beside this, can you give example who got maximum benefits. If that list is available, that would be benefitial and source of help/inspiration
It's a delicate balance act, for sure. "Relevant" to me may be "less relevant" to you. We all weight the criteria that make up relevance in our own unique way.
Speaking of relevance...it's time for me to Google "What should I make for dinner tonight so Mrs. Hepburn can take it easy when she gets home?" Thanks for the insights. Good stuff.
Google's 1st attempt to get site owners to go mobile or go home didn't work as well when they tried it with AdWords Enhanced campaigns. It's likely that this will do what that update failed to do... get more advertisers bidding on mobile PPC.
Well seeing as "Desktop outpaced mobile search spend nearly 4-to-1" in 2014, that could definitely be a pain point Google is looking to remedy.
I thought Google AdWords advisors had been requested to strongly promote mobile and drive up CPC in this area
I personally think 2 days is way too soon to understand any type of conclusive data. Give it 2 to 4 weeks (or months) before there is any trend to make sense of. (Glad to see that your blog is mobile friendly! :)
Never have so many words been written about so little news.
I jest, I jest. But in all seriousness, the amount of hand-wringing...er, posts...about the mobile update has, so far, been out of scale relative to the overall impact of this update.
Rand nailed it, I think: If the goal of Google is to deliver users the best, most relevant result, the substance of the message has to trump format. Both are important, but when it gets down to it, I think most users would sacrifice mobile-friendliness in exchange for a page that better answers their question.
I think the goal of Google is to deliver results that are just relevant enough to keep people coming back to click on ads, which is a difficult balance. CTR drops on mobile scared them, and their push to mobile-first design is real. If promoting mobile-friendly sites over other relevance factors works in their favor, I have no doubt that they'll do it.
The traffic to my sites has not changed any since the Google update. Some are mobile optimized, most are not. You can read a detailed analysis of the stats for my Dumb.com site at https://www.impulsecorp.com/mobilegeddon .
I enjoyed reading your article, Eric. I am betting that lots of companies spent buckets of money converting their websites to "mobile-friendly" and are seeing a puny benefit from that cost.
Google used FUD as motivation for a coding goal rather than a genuine improvement in the website. So, if Google now demotes sites that did not comply, the content quality of their SERPs will decline. So, I think that mobile-friendly is going to be a puny factor in the mobile algo.
A non-mobile-friendly site may have not experienced as great of a change in their mobile search ranking as Google insinuated with their algorithm update. However, the user experience with the site is still greatly affected.
A business should seek to become mobile-friendly to provide a better experience for their customer not just for Google update. On average our clients at WompMobile experience an increase in conversion by 150% after their mobile site is launched. Increasing conversion rates, satisfying customer needs, and a possible increase of the mobile SERP, what’s there to lose?!
In the Netherlands, I found significant changes in the desktop results. Google Hotel Finder has now entered the organic results and Google Carrousel for local businesses has disappeared. Also, the "snack pack" as mentioned here has been introduced in desktop search, which wasn't here before April 2015.
Sorry, but since I only serve the Dutch market, my blog about the "discoveries" is in Dutch ;-)
Thanks - I accidentally spotted the snack pack roll-out in Australia over the past couple of weeks, too, so it looks like that may have gone international.
Dr Pete-
Thanks once again for a wealth of information and analysis. Although I didn't think the update would live up to the "media hype", I will admit that it did make us take some time to make sure our mobile presence was in good order. In some ways I think that part of this may have been to scare webmasters into making sure they are mobile friendly more than anything else.
One surprising aspect for me so far though are the mobile knowledge graphs. I might have thought Google would make sure mobile-friendly pages were used for those, but I have seen a a bunch of mobile serps in the lat two days that show I was wrong. I guess only time will tell.
great... I am monitoring too, marked some 70% Up, in keyword Kado Ulang Tahun
Interesting first analysis of what you're seeing so far. I don't think we'll truly know the rollout's effect until at least mid-May.
Then I suppose the data I'm interested in seeing on our end is average rankings (for our clients) from April 1 to April 16, April 17 to April 30 and May 1 to May 15. Those 3 ranges should show enough change for us to see what really moved. We have run and are running thousands of reports across about 150,000 keyphrases so when it's all said & done, we should have a fairly large dataset to compare.
Also, from a Moz point of view: across the 30% of non-mobile-friendly pages, could you track the average movement over those time frames? That would give you a fairly good idea of how mobile changed. Just comparing the URLs that were ranking vs their "new position" May 15th would be great data.
Ahhhh analyse all the things!
I was kinda expecting a bigger change, like many people. Beings how we are dealing with Google what else did we expect? I so appreciated what was said in this article and how much was put into it. It could be possible that Google is running another update in the background and is trying to take away from it.
Quality CONTENT is still primary... mobile-friendly is secondary.
Right! I am glad that they didn't lose sight of that.
Personally, I'm glad the impact is minimal. Any change beyond that would essentially prioritize form over function, and compete with everything Google has preached about quality. As a user I still want the best answer, not the best mobile answer. And given that Chrome is my browser of choice and can "carry" search history from one device to another when I'm logged in , I'd even be willing to prioritize consistency (of SERPs) before format.
Where is that promised update?
I'll do a 7-day update tomorrow. There was little or nothing to report over the weekend. We've been playing it by ear.
Ah, great!
I Agree too
I am a bit surprised that being mobile-friendly or not being mobile friendly didn't make a bigger difference in the mobile SERPs - I say that based upon how Google marketed the need to get your site mobile friendly - even marking sites in the SERPs with that designation.
I am sure that lots of people exerted themselves and spent major money converting their sites and and now feel that, like the https scare, this was another example propeller hat whimsy from Google.
I think Google genuinely wants/needs results to be mobile-friendly, but they've found that spreading FUD is more powerful, less risky, and much cheaper than actually making major algorithm changes. We've done their work for them this time around.
FUD. I agree.
I think that people are still figuring out how a mobile site should be designed, and that there are many ways to effectively make a mobile page for products, categories, articles, homepages, etc.
In my opinion, "Mobile-Friendly" was a "coding goal" set by google and not a "usability goal". Any bonus in the SERPs that there were offering with this update was simply based upon you having the right code.
If Google was serious about improving mobile usability they should have started a long time ago, discovered how to DESIGN mobile pages of various kinds and held good performing pages of various kinds up as examples. They didn't do that, they just threatened people to get the right code on their pages. So webmasters spent buckets of money getting the right code and slapping it on their site, without advancing the usability or the quality of their pages / websites.
If Google would have made Mobile-Friendly a big factor in the mobile algo the quality of pages in the SERPs would have dropped.
That's just an opinion.
Eight days have passed and we cannot see any important changes. Our industry is still showing an important percentage of non-mobile sites in the top mobile ranks. :(
Dr.Pete, something tells me that the heat is up big time today.
Over the past 2 days, there was a considerable jump in URLs marked "Mobile-friendly", but, oddly, almost no rankings flux. That could mean something is coming.
Google has confirmed the update has now been fully rolled out but they also state that it that it will take another two weeks too reindex the penalised sites.
The ETA for for full effect off "mobilegeddon" is set for 15th may 2015 - fingers crossed everyone!
Webmaster tools is showing me something I can't explain. After "mobilegeddon" our (mobile) avg. position improved significantly, but both clicks & impressions have dropped off significantly. Especially on branded terms. How is it that our mobile SERP improves but click & impressions take a hit? Thanks!
I have not personally seen any great change after April 21. Largely because my site was already mobile friendly.
The biggest big change I saw is that increased my company revenue due to the increase of web sites that want to adapt your website to mobile hehe.
I was curious about a mobile sitemap? I understand that we're still pushing for responsive designs around the web, but I've read so many conflicting reports about submitting both a sitemap and mobile sitemap. What are everyone's thoughts on this issue? What is recommended in order to ensure proper submission to Google Webmaster Tools??
Thanks in advance.
Hello!
Does anyone know about Google penalties after responsive switching?
I have noticed that a couple of websites that have turned to responsive have lost positions and not gained them.
Some of them have been erased from Google results. That's heavy.
Are there some common mistakes when you turn responsive?
Thanx a lot
Very useful analysis; I wonder why Google gives a particular date for the update when the effect appears to be spread out and the onset is before the given time?
nice
15 days later all our sites are seeing a jump in rankings . One went from #10 to #1.
Congratulations, my positions still in same positions...
On my sites that are not Mobile-Friendly yet, the ratio of iphone visits to total visits has dropped. The drop started occurring last Thursday and Friday. It pretty easy to check this just plot an X-Y graph with total visits on one axis and iphone (or other mobile) visits on the other axis.
I don't see any real change in my trophy keywords, so the long tail keywords is where the loss seems to be occurring. I am lucky that mobile traffic is a very small percentage of my total visitors.
Interesting... because in the past week I've actually seen an uptick in mobile visits to my (mobile-unfriendly) site. In the past week mobile has actually been a little higher than tablet, but well behind desktop. The mobile average time spent on the site is also a little higher than usual. I'm guessing the increase is coming from folks using larger phones. My site is fairly easy to use on the larger phones, just not on the older smaller phones. My placement in search remains in the top 3 to 5; same as before the "roll-out." IF there ever is a serious re-shuffling to occur, I sense it will be somewhere much farther down the timeline...
Would love to see a follow-up to this in a few days.
Expect a follow-up at 7 days (tomorrow), but the weekend was pretty quiet.
Is there any latest update of mobile friendly updates after passing two weeks and so?
Great post! With these data it is clear that searches from mobile devices offer different results since last April 21. In my case, the websites of our customers have also risen positions because their websites were already in responsive design.
Just haven't seen much in the way of SERP changes here in Canada after the roll out - do expect some though ;-)
Do you think it's possible that Google will eventually look at the device the user was on when they amplified one's content?
Using social shares as an actual ranking signal in this example, but would a piece of content that had 90% of its social shares by users on mobile devices have a slight edge in the mobile SERPs over a piece of content that was shared the same amount, but only 10% came from users on mobile devices? Or, do you think something like this will come down the road?
So far, I'm of the position that this has been blown out of proportion. I just find it hard to believe that Google was not already factoring in mobile friendliness in mobile SERPS. I have been monitoring my clients data closely and nothing have yet to see any change. Will continue to monitor over the coming weeks but I don't expect to see anything significant.
They already were - see here for one quote: "Starting April 21, we will be expanding our use of mobile-friendliness as a ranking signal."
Have you looked at the difference between mobile and desktop rankings for your clients? Mine with "mobile-friendly" sites were slightly better on mobile (just by a place or 2, averaging over all keywords) compared to desktop already. Those without "mobile-friendly" sites were on average ranking slightly worse on mobile search, but some were slightly better.
I am monitoring too, marked some 22% traffic Down
Thank you
I think this update useful but Ineffective like we Imagine
Hi Peter!
Many expect a big change for day 21. Despite having made the necessary changes to our website, have not noticed much difference from last week. I guess that still have to wait a couple of weeks so we can see the results of the change in the search results.
We look forward to maintaining this article to keep abreast of the changes that occur.
Great job!
Great post sir!!
You're right this "mobilegeddon" has not yet proved to be that disastrous as it was speculated. I'm still seeing lots of competitors sites on competitive terms without mobile friendly tags. Though, some of our sites get a boost but not very significant.
As John Mueller said, it will be a month-long update so we may see something in upcoming days.
Great analysis. The numbers and statistics provided are indisputable although it seems that the " Mobilegeddon " is not over yet . So far, the changes do not seem drastic but it seems that Google is still stalking the sites unfriendly to smartphones and tablets
Dr. Meyers -Lots of good information in the article and a ton of research as well. You're passion for this industry is expressed very well in this article. I look forward to reading more.
I have been following the Mobile friendly update for a while. I’m not seeing that big of an impact to “Non Mobile friendly” sites in my industry (Balloon Artist or Balloon stores). It was my understanding that if your site was not mobile ready “Your listing would not appear on the mobile device” because Google wants the end user (Mobile surfer) to have a great mobile experience. Not being mobile friendly would be a bad customer experience. I currently do not see this happening so far with this release or it has not been implemented everywhere as of yet.
I see balloon sites in the Dallas area that are” not Mobile friendly”, no google reviews and onsite page factors missing. I have learned this year to “know your competition”. I figured with all the hoopla of the Mobile friendly they would start to rank below us.
Thoughts on why Non Mobile friendly sites are showing up?
I still not see any change up to now. yarh ...Google may take a week for this update. However, in my point of view, most of websites that get high ranking also get very good mobile optimize. Therefore, we may not see a big change in next time.
Finally , it seems that the change has not been for both or at least I have not noticed much . I imagine that soon Google will give a new turn ... Still, I think it has all the alarm generated by this " Mobilegeddon " has been positive because it has forced improve mobile designs of many websites . And this is good for everyone.
With Google now showing 'dynamic' breadcrumbs for mobile SERPS, is this likely to overwite existing rich snippet data, or do you guys think rich snippet mark-up will take priority? Thanks!
Wow, nothing happened!
It's not as big as expected (yet?). But hey I like the fact that some sites thought it's going to be bigger, yes Moz I like the mobile version of your blog;)
There is no change on Mobile SERP, initially i was curious to see the results, now i came back to normal.
Kind Regards
Dr. Pete - great post! One common issue I'm seeing out there, are sites that have blogs embedded from 3rd party CMS's that are not mobile responsive. I estimate this will hurt any organic traffic coming to these sites from these embeded blogs, that are not mobile-friendly.
I would say a much expected update. After a long trail of Panda and penguins Google had only one big domain to improve their algorithm and here it comes. Your analysis is really in short time and accurate
Great writeup and observations!
One thing I am watching closely is how Mobile Referred Traffic will be impacted for a few clients who get a lot of mobile traffic from that medium. I haven't actually dug into the mobile-friendlieness of some of their traffic referrers...so hopefully they are all on point and continue to deliver steady streams of traffic. Definitely keeping an eye on mobile traffic over the coming weeks.
I feel the roll out hit Europe on day two as I've seen a bigger impact on the 22nd vs 21st. However, it's still small in comparison to what I was expecting, and even the slight drop may not be due to the mobile update. I'll have a better idea of the impact after 7-10 days.
After 7 days of data, I can see that the update led to an increase in mobile organic traffic.
I am very curious how all this will impact all kinds of businesses and the emerging younger markets that are strongly buy happy...thanks
The update is still rolling out according to Google, it's too early to say anything about mobile results. One of my website started doing quite well in mobile results for a day or two and then it came back to its original spot in two days on some queries. Let's see how good or bad it does to us.
Nothing happen to my site www.hitasoft.com however i check this site on www.google.com/webmasters/tools/mobile-friendly/ and see the result that my site has passed in this test. And so i think this will take time to see the exact and full effects of this update.
I hope my site will rank..
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Wow! I love everything about this post - from the melodramatic intro to the smart approach of looking at flux data and tracking the potential losers! It's fascinating that YouTube only showed up as mobile-friendly about 1/4 of the time.
I geek out on mobile (and mobile SEO) all day every day as part of my job at Moovweb and have had Mobilegeddon on my mind lately. Last week, I noticed that Amazon pages listed in mobile search results for retail keywords I was looking at didn't always have the mobile-friendly label. It surprised me and I wondered the extent of the issue, so it's good to match a number (62.3%) to what I'd seen.
I also noticed that search results showed URLs without the mobile-friendly tag even though the same URLs showed up as mobile-friendly in Google's Mobile-Friendly test tool. But this may have just been a delay in the Googlebot crawling those pages, and I totally agree the tag is the best proxy.
Thanks for gathering all this interesting info! I will definitely stay tuned. :)
Interesting! I'm still hoping for some big changes. Will be checking back for more updates.
The update will rolling on for a week, take your time for some big change ineedmoney !
I agree!!!