The cat is finally out of the bag. The rumor about change in possible algorithm of Google has been confirmed. Google has made it clear that a0fter 21 April, it will tweak the algorithm to suit the mobile- optimized site. This has come as a shock for many businesses whose site is not optimized yet,
The cat is finally out of the bag. The rumor about change in possible algorithm of Google has been confirmed. Google has made it clear that a0fter 21 April, it will tweak the algorithm to suit the mobile- optimized site. This has come as a shock for many businesses whose site is not optimized yet, and they did not feel the need to have an optimized site.
Google was preferring mobile optimized site from the last 1-2 years. But, the recent move of the search engine giant is a bad news for many website owners whose site is not mobile-friendly yet.
What does this mean?
This means that Google will explicitly award higher ranking to those websites that are mobile friendly. The surprising thing is that it has not only announced about the possible update, but also put a clear dateline. The webmaster central blog says that we will expanding our use of mobile-friendliness as a ranking signal from April 21. You can easily imagine the nightmare of the Penguin and Panda updates in the past. Many businesses could not recover from the damage for good.
Mobile-friendliness is a new term that means your site fits into various screen-sizes automatically, and you don’t need to design separate website for desktop, tablet and mobile. It is fluid like water that takes the shape of the pot in which it is put.
Loss in ranking will have severe implications for many businesses. It means much less traffic, less leads, and fewer conversions. Your competitor website will be ahead of your website in SERP. Additionally, your SEO efforts will mean little. Would you like to make that happen? It also means Google-bot will crawl through your CSS and JavaScript to check if your site passes the mobile-friendly test. Google is already working on a dedicated mobile index for the purpose.
Why Google is doing this?
The reason is very simple. The world is fast becoming mobile friendly. There is more thrust on apps. Last year was critical in the sense that the number of smartphones surpassed the number of desktops. It was not possible for the Google to ignore this factor for a long time. After all, its aim is to provide best search experience to its user.
It is not that Google is doing this suddenly. Famous search engine consultant Bary Schwartz had already told a year ago that Google was alarming webmasters of those sites with mobility errors of 100 percent. It meant Google was very much serious about this factor.
Google has always focused on delivering the finest user-experience. And, directing a large number of mobile users to sites that are not mobile –friendly is hardly a sensible thing to do.
How it will affect your business
It will have a huge impact on your business. Understand this from an example: if you and your competitor X compete each-other in the marketplace, and both of you rank on the first page on SERP. However, if after 21 April, your site is penalized by Google because your site is non-responsive, your ranking will be gone. In the world of search engine, if you are not on the first page, you are almost invisible! Do you understand implications of being invisible in an era when businesses largely depend on digital searches. Your competitor will beat you hollow in your game. Its like your arms will become pretty useless in the war.
Other changes that will leave you stunned
It is not the only thing to haunt the webmasters, with this move, Google aims to check the spams. That is why Google has made this very clear that it will also penalize the doorway pages. A doorway page is a website that is designed with the specific purpose of ranking higher in the search. These website don’t have useful information.
How much traffic can you lose after 21 April update?
To get the hint of the potential loss of traffic, use a list of most important keywords for your site. Check the performance of mobile ranking and desktop ranking for these keywords, and see the difference. You can check smartphone ranking in the SEMRush.com. It will give you a good idea about the impact of the update. Though, it is not a full-proof method, but still good to gauge the impact. In any case, you will lose almost 80-90 percent of the inbound traffic.
How to avoid?
You can avoid this dreadful scenario by converting your site into a mobile-optimized or mobile –friendly site. If your site has large number of pages, it is all the more important. A developer will tweak your programme to make it responsive. It is an onerous task. You should act fast.
Call to action: We have saved many clients from Google’s possible penalty, We can do it for you. Hurry up before it becomes too late.