Labelled ‘Mobilegeddon‘ by Entrepreneur magazine and SEO industry insiders – the big change to Google’s algorithm back in April 2017 caught many companies by surprise. As with Google’s other updates – Penguin, Panda & Hummingbird, it negatively affected many businesses that weren’t mobile-friendly and relied on organic search for their business.
Being penalised by Google can be an expensive exercise. Depending on the extent of the penalty from Google, we’ve heard of businesses forking out 10’s of £000’s + and in some cases they simply never recovered…
Don’t get swept up in the nets!
Google is often seen as behaving God-like, deciding on the fate of businesses with swingeing changes to its algorithm. In reality, they probably make these changes to protect us all from spammy Viagra-led hacks and online crooks. So, Googles intention of serving up quality, relevant links to us all is in everyone’s interest. The sad part is that it needs to be automated and programmatic because of the scale of the task and that’s where some innocent fish will get swept up in the nets.
According to research by BIAKelsey Mobile search queries surpassed desktop queries back in 2015. This behavioural trend is set to continue with the addition of new mobile devices such as tablets and watches until mobile dominates search.
To ensure relevancy Google is set to make a change in its algorithm this April that favours websites with mobile-friendly pages. It’s a system change, or mechanical process, calculated by machines with no emotion, so it’s worth considering that there will be innocent victims amongst the tidal change who simply ‘weren’t-quite mobile-friendly enough’.