April 21, 2015 Came, And…
The deadline Google has given for making your website mobile friendly (MF)has come and gone. The April 21 algorithm roll out had some folks looking outside to see if the black clouds was headed their way. So what changes have we seen so far? Drum roll, please…Not much.
Google has warned us all that sites non-responsiveness, aka those which are not mobile friendly, will be penalized in search results after April 21. When that date came and went without much upset to the rankings as they had been, the question became: Is the algorithm fully rolled out? The answer, as of May 1 is yes. Search Engine Land reported confirmation from Google’s Gary Illyes has confirmed the algorithm is completely rolled out. Illyes cited the large increase in the number of mobile friendly sites and the time it takes to reindex pages as reasons for a general lack changes to current rankings.
Because so many sites did make the change to a mobile friendly site, both Moz and Search Engine Land predict there will not be as much rank-shuffling as predicted in Goggle’s mobile search results. While the number of MF sites only increased by about 5% by April 21, as compared to the number before the new update was announced, that still amounts to millions of sites that need to be reindexed.
Do You Still Need to Be Mobile Friendly?
The danger of dropping off the mobile rankings map is still very real for companies whose websites are not mobile friendly. While sites that are mobile friendly are not seeing much difference—even those who have only recently become MF—some sites are disappearing from Google’s mobile search results.
As Google continues to index pages and there has been and will continue to be ongoing changes to rank positions. While it hasn’t been the upheaval once predicted, it isn’t quite over yet.