Google to penalise websites

[Alan.P]

I haven't seen this mentioned anywhere so thought I would bring it up. I just heard on the radio that Google are soon to penalise websites that aren't mobile and / or tablet friendly, not sure how they would do this, probably something to do with page rankings ? anyone heard of this, Dan ?

 

[Alan.P]

What I meant by this is had anyone with a website that's hosted been informed of any changes or were / are your sites already configured for the mobile age

 

[Colour Republic]

It's been in the pipe line for a while and now is the deadline.

If you site isn't mobile friendly it will suffer slightly but it will suffer more on searches that are made via mobile devices.

For example you could be in page 1 when someone searches from a desktop or laptop, but you could be on page 3/4 when someone searches via their phone or tablet if you website isn't mobile friendly.

 

[Dave]

Mines not mobile friendly and I did read about this news ... I'll have to see if I can get a plugin .

it works ok On my iPad but not on iPhone.

 

[Alan.P]

I'm not sure how drastic a change it will make, just thought I'd mention it for folks that were interested but maybe weren't aware of.

 

[Dan]

It doesn't appear to just mean having a responsive page. So one that changes size and whatnot based on what device it is being used on. So don't worry too much.

Go to your phone and search for your website; if you see 'mobile-friendly' next to the URL you're fine and Google is recognising that your website works fine on mobiles. Might not look as good as it can be but who's to say that's a ranking factor. That's personal preference.

Also register for a Google Webmasters account and render a few pages of your website as a smartphone and see how Google sees it.

Google is reporting that my plumbing and electrical forum are mobile friendly. Even though they're not responsive (change size to fit the device) and my Webmasters account isn't showing messages regarding that either. So I assume it's more functionality related. Google aren't always too clear about their policy changes to be fair and 'seo experts' tend to have different results when testing things out. So it's hard to tell.

I'm making a move over to CSS-based styling that's responsive throughout all my websites and forums (slowly!) and also arranging apps for those that it applies to (inc this forum). But not for Google, for the users. And that's who you need to think about first.

If you have unique content and your users come back, Google and other search engines will rank you well. Don't worry.

Bing is making a bit of a comeback but it's only taking a smallish share off Google right now. Some say it might improve over time and Google only needs to screw up one of its bi-weekly algorithm updates and it'll have a knock-on effect for a while. Penguin and panda updates are two that didn't go well in some terms and it took a while to correct a few mistakes. Luckily we didn't get hit by anything so far.