Is your site ready for the Google's Mobile Armageddon?

[SiteChef]

Next Tuesday (April 21) Google is making a change to its algorithm to favor sites that are mobile friendly. If your website is not mobile friendly, you might face a penalization and appear lower in search results for not accomodating mobile devices. Are you ready?

If you use Wordpress, you can solve this issue quickly with a few free plugins. But if you're on a static site or use a more modular CMS like Joomla/Drupal, you'll need to make changes to your template to accomodate it.

So is your website ready?

 

[elcidofaguy]

G's changes only applies to mobile searches and not desktop search... Further its one factor out of many and thus backlinks, bounce rates etc are hugely relevant... so for me I don't anticipate any such Armageddon...

A lot of my sites are using responsive themes but that said I personally don't like them... I still cant understand why its such a big deal to assume mobile users are unable to user their fingers to zoom in and around a desktop page lol ;-) I actually prefer that than to have items stacked on top of each other and having to scroll down the page to find stuff or annoyingly have parts of a website missing due to the way a responsive theme operates...

 

[SiteChef]

Thanks for the input elcidofaguy - mobile search is growing and likely to outpace regular desktop searches (especially with Google Now, which is Android's equivalent of Siri).

Google also recommends responsive themes to avoid duplicate content that can come in other forms of mobile sites.

 

[elcidofaguy]

elcidofaguy

SiteChef yes indeed there is no doubt on my part that mobile search is on a massive increase and is well on the way to outpacing desktop searches ;-)

That said I've noted that mobile users can be terrible to when it comes to sales... For example on Adwords I dont bother spending PPC on mobile devices as I found a get a lot of clicks but little in the way of sales in order to achieve a good ROI... I suspect it depends on the niche e.g. booking hotels, geospatial related, buying apps etc works well on mobiles but selling digital products, software just doesn't even come close... I kind of understand that too as I personally would only buy certain things from my mobile whilst leaving other things to be done on my laptop... So I guess the jury is still out on that one for me lol...

Regarding the duplicate content issue - the easy fix to that is to use the canonicalization tag within your header code which will ensure that the only one version of your page is attributed with link juice and ranked appropriately...

For sure it will be very interesting to see how mobile search evolves in the coming years... Certainly we all need to be thinking on those lines and on how to improve mobile conversions... That said I'm also sure G is becoming increasingly concerned with losing market share with many apps eating away on that together with direct content sources.... it wont happen overnight but within 10 years from now I'm sure G's monopoly on search will be a thing of the past with the landscape looking very different indeed ;-)

 

[SiteChef]

Don't get me wrong, I hate responsive design as well - it's far too much work for little return, especially when you could just do a mobile site and reduce overall content effort and time for content management. /rant

I think a part of why mobile sales hasn't taken off is because people don't feel secure entering in their CC details on their cell phone using wifi and data.

 

[Nytshade]

Every time I'm on the road, I only use mobile to check updates such as facebook, google+, twitter etc notifications or emails and nothing else. I'll respond to some but mostly I'll save the rest and respond to them later when I'm on my desktop.

Yep, I'm old school like that D:

I don't do much on mobile and I think most people do the same, they don't take much action on mobile. Everyday I invite people to my facebook page via inbox messages (using software obviously) and the most common response I get is:

"Thanks I'll check it out later on my pc"
or
"I'm on my mobile phone and will check it out when I arrive home..."

Or anything similar to that and the most surprising thing is that I'm inviting these people to a fan page not to a website. It's not like they need to sign up or anything like that, but they just want to be on a desktop computer to like the page and check other posts to see if it's something they want to follow.

Every time I get response like that I put it on a notepad then later on reply to it and ask them if they did check it out. The response I get is always something like this:

"I just check it out, thanks man, exactly what I'm looking for..."
or
"Yes I did and I even downloaded your book about..."

Or anything similar to that. So that is why when I do PPC, I switch off mobile traffic. I don't want any mobile traffic on my sites because I know people don't take action on a mobile device.

So when I saw the new Google's Mobile Armageddon (nice name btw hehe) I was like: Yessssssss....... Thnx Google, I don't want those clowns on my site D:

So for me, I can't wait for Google to roll out that update, bring it on.

Are my websites mobile optimized? I don't know and I care less, not that I don't care at all, I just care less. I use responsive designs and whether they are mobile friendly or not I care less.

Am I ready for the Armageddon? I don't know and I care less haha D:

 

[SEOPub]

It's actually not even impacting mobile search. It is only mobile search on smartphones. This change will not play a role in searches performed on tablets.

So really, unless your site relies on a lot of smartphone search traffic, you are unlikely to see any impact from this change.

 

[Binujha]

Just five days to go. We can see the updates impact on Mobile search results. This is a good move, since smart phone users are increasing day by day. And those businesses whose traffic is more from mobile should enhance their sites accordingly.