Have You Prepared for Mobilegeddon?

We've been pushing mobile websites for quite a while now, and recent reports have shown that mobile activity accounts for up to 60% of all Google searches—so with mobile adoption increasing, we hope you'll be on board with responsive design. If you haven't started development yet, now is the time or you may take a big hit on your search engine rankings on mobile devices. What many webmasters have dubbed Mobilegeddon, is a Google search algorithm update that prioritizes mobile-friendly websites and goes into effect April 21st. If you are already set up with a responsive website you should be feeling pretty good. If not, keep reading below and we'll tell you more.

Let's Start with Google's Webmaster Blog (Read More) »

When it comes to search on mobile devices, users should get the most relevant and timely results, no matter if the information lives on mobile-friendly web pages or apps. As more people use mobile devices to access the internet, our algorithms have to adapt to these usage patterns. In the past, we’ve made updates to ensure a site is configured properly and viewable on modern devices. We’ve made it easier for users to find mobile-friendly web pages and we’ve introduced App Indexing to surface useful content from apps. Today, we’re announcing two important changes to help users discover more mobile-friendly content:

1. More mobile-friendly websites in search results

2. More relevant app content in search results

Mobile-friendly labels

On top of simply re-organizing search results based on mobile-friendliness, Google will also be putting a mobile-friendly label on search results they have deemed to be mobile-friendly. This will help users find websites that will work better with their devices, and encourage them to visit your mobile or responsive site.

What is Google looking for?

• Link spacing to avoid misclicks
• Large, readable fonts (14px or 16px is a good default size for mobile devices)
• Content that's bigger than the screen itself
• Viewport tags
• Load times
• Popups
• Faulty redirects
• Flash objects, which are unsupported on some major browsers and devices
• Canonical tags (if you're using a separate mobile site)
• *If you have a robots.txt file blocking search engines from crawling CSS & JavaScript resources Google won't have an accurate view of how your site displays on mobile.

Test your website

With Google's new update, if you see a Mobile-friendly tag next to your website on Google's search results then you're good-to-go. If not, you may still need some updates before Google stops punishing your website. You can also visit Google's Mobile-Friendly Test Page and Google's PageSpeed Insights Page for further insight.

Get started

With Mobilegeddon coming next Tuesday, making your website mobile-friendly should be a top priority in order to maintain or improve your SEO. This is an extremely important update, so if you still have questions or want to learn more please shoot us a message. We'd love to hear from you!