Google will be releasing an infrastructure update on April 21st that could impact your site and your search engine rankings. If your site is not designed to be mobile-friendly, ie it doesn’t scale down well to be browse-able on small devices, you might find your Google ranking dropping.
In this post at Moz.com, Cindy Krum writes:
2. If my site is not mobile-friendly, will this impact my desktop rankings as well?
Answer: On a panel at SMX Munich (2 weeks after SMX West) Zineb from Google answered ‘no’ without hesitation. We took this as another indication that the new index is related to a new crawler and/or a major change to the infrastructure they are using to parse, index, and evaluate mobile search results but not desktop results. That said, you should probably take some time soon to make sure that your site works—at least in a passable way—on mobile devices, just in case there are eventual desktop repercussions (and because this is a user experience best practice that can lead to other improvements that are still desktop ranking factors, such as decreasing your bounce rate).
But, and this is a big deal, 60{c7b60e2cbf05491f89f9e74f3717ec60182ef12b096a84966c0d04f7fd47435c} of Google searches are now being done on a mobile device. This could affect your site’s visibility for a healthy majority of your visitors if you’re not prepared.
AloeRoot customers who have received a new site in the last few years already have mobile-friendly designs; I’ll be doing some follow-up testing shortly to see if there are any adjustments my clients should be making to their layouts.
If your site is on the older side or you’re not sure if you’re prepared, give me a call today and I’ll give you a report.