If you press your ear up close to the World Wide Web you will hear a lot of chatter and the sound of an uneasy jungle! This noise has been slowly getting louder and the message is clear ‘The 21st of April is coming’!
So what is all this racket about?
Well Google is due to launch its mobile crawler which will index mobile friendly websites!
I know, I’m just as excited as you are but what does it actually mean? In all honesty I would be lying if I said that I knew, it’s more about listening closely to what Google have stated at various conferences and what the ‘wise ones’ are saying.
From what I can make out the underlying current goes like this:- If you have a website then you should make every effort to make it mobile friendly (responsive) or create a mobile version. If you fail to do this then it will have an impact on your traffic. The next question is which traffic? We are now looking at two different animals; desktop search engine results pages (SERPS) and mobile SERPS.
In an effort for Google to return the best possible results for any search it uses many criteria to establish which results to show you, geography is an important part of this exercise. When you are sat at your desk conducting some searches you would expect to have results that are relevant to your location and the content of your search. You now pick-up your mobile device and drive a hundred miles, the search results that you demand must be local to where you are now, not where you were.
This is where it becomes important to have a mobile friendly website!
Google appear to be basically splitting-out the traffic sources and providing relevant results for what has quickly become a transient audience.
The explosion of the mobile market place has created new challenges for web developers and online marketers and as ever our crusade to assist our clients get the best possible exposure and traffic to their websites.
When Google were asked at SMX Munich “If my website is not mobile-friendly, will it impact my desktop rankings as well?” their answer was clear and definite “No!” I feel that the answer could just as easily have been “Not now but in the future maybe!”
If you are in any doubt as to whether your website will pass the test those nice folk at Google have provided a tool to test your website. The Mobile-Friendly Test will highlight any errors associated with the page that you enter into the box. If you wish to check your entire website enter ‘site:yourdomainname’.
