Google Update - 19 Apr 2016

Google Mobile-Friendliness Will Become A Stronger Ranking Signal In May 2016

If you have been dragging your heels in terms of designing your website for mobile-friendliness, you may want to get in gear and start working on it now. Last year, Google introduced mobile friendliness to its ranking signals and this coming May, Google plans to ramp up this signal a notch further.

This upcoming update from Google is geared toward enhancing online users’ ability to locate relevant content via their mobile devices with relative ease. This new change in Google’s algorithm may eliminate a number of non-mobile friendly websites which were visible at the top of the search rankings previously and replace them with only website containing relevant content and designed with mobile users in mind.

According to Google, this latest rollout on mobile-friendliness ranking signal will begin in May of this year, but will be rolled out gradually. Google has not provided a definitive timeline on when the rollout will be fully completed, but it is fair to assume that it won’t happen overnight, given Google will need to crawl and index each page of a site.

If your website is not currently Google mobile friendly, you will likely encounter issues with respect to Google rankings, which in turn make your site invisible to the rest of the virtual world. Neglecting to redesign your website for mobile-friendliness can have catastrophic effects on your business profit margins, which could essentially drive your business to the ground.

In order to prevent your site from vanishing from Google rankings, begin redesigning your website for mobile-friendliness.

If your site, however, is already designed efficiently for mobile users, this upcoming ranking signal will have no effect on its Google search rankings performance.

Uncertain if your website is currently mobile friendly, or is meeting the design guidelines Google deems necessary to enhance the user experience for mobile users? Support is available via two helpful resources: Mobile Friendly Test and Webmaster Mobile Guide.

Discussion on the latest soon-to-release Google update straight from English Google Webmaster Central Office-hours on “Hangouts on Air”!

There are a number of search rankings factors which Google considers to be important, but as of late, website mobile friendliness appears to be a dominating factor they want all Website owners to pay attention to and address.