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The new mobile algorithm that Google announced back in February was launched, for several months the SEO community only thought about it, forgetting about everything else. And now the so-called “Mobilegeddon” has arrived, what has changed?
Jason DeMers, a columnist for the Internet portal Search Engine Land, analyzed the results of studies devoted to the consequences of Google’s mobile friendly algorithm and collected everything in one material.
Searchmetrics: First of all, the visibility of sites in mobile search has changed, on desktop everything is still stable.
Analyzing the collected data, Searchmetrics found that sites not adapted for mobile dropped by 0.21 positions, and the positions of many sites also fell in mobile search results, but in desktop search the sites remained in place or even improved their positions.
The graph shows that on April 21 there was an update that affected only mobile search, mobile dropped by 35%, and in desktop search everything remained the same.
BrightEdge: Non-mobile friendly URLs fell on the first 3 pages
The content marketing company BrightEdge monitored more than 20,000 URL addresses and recorded a drop of 21% of URLs that were not adapted for mobile devices on the first pages of the search results. The algorithm had the greatest impact on pages 2 and 3, and on the first page the percentage of position decrease was only 17.3%.
“We think that mobile friendliness has a big impact on pages 2 and 3, but not as much on the first page, because there are fewer ranking factors on pages 2 and 3.”
It was also noted that sites with high user experience scores (80 and above in PageSpeed Insights) get some benefits when analyzing their mobile friendliness level.
Moz: Small increase in rankings on page 1 of mobile friendly results
Moz’s Pete Meyers analyzed the seven-day impact of Google’s mobile algorithm. And while there has been some uptick in mobile friendly results on the first page, the impact of the algorithm is much smaller than many expected.
Pete also noted that there is some error in the data, as many sites have already been adapted for mobile search.
Larry Kim: Algorithm Didn’t Impact Brand Queries
Larry Kim, founder and CTO of WordStream, in a conversation with Mike O’Brien (Search Engine Watch) pointed out that most likely brand queries did not feel the impact of the algorithm, even those not optimized for mobile. And this is quite logical, it would be stupid not to send branded queries to the site, just because it is not optimized. But for other keywords, preference is given to mobile-friendly sites.
O’Brien himself gives the example of the American Apparel site. The company’s site did not pass the mobile-friendly test and lost many positions in the ranking, not counting branded queries.
3Q Digital: Site loading speed may become the most important ranking factor after “Mobilegeddon”
Visiting the site through mobile browsers or using a weak processor shows that page loading speed is more important than mobile-friendliness. An adapted website can take a very long time to load and still pass Google’s mobile-friendly test.
3Q Digital analyzed three client websites to determine how the update affected different types of mobile websites:
The algorithm had the greatest impact on mobile and adaptive websites. No changes were noticed on websites with configured dynamic server responses.
