If you escaped the initial warning letters from Google alerting webmasters that their sites were not mobile friendly, don’t breathe too easily. Google is continuing to send out new emails letting webmasters know that these issues can negatively impact their visibility and mobile search results – and there is evidence that some of those who received the initial letters have lost some mobile rankings.
Webmasters are reporting that they’ve received new letters both yesterday and today, so they are definitely still checking websites to see if there be mobile friendly or not and anticipate them be impacted in the near future when it comes to mobile search results.
It is unclear how Google is going about checking websites. Are they starting with sites that tend to be slower first? Search query competitiveness? Or are they just systematically going through every website may have indexed and sending messages to those webmasters were there are issues found.
Many webmasters who received the previous morning found that some of their sites now have a lower visibility in mobile, although they remained relatively stable in desktop. So if they were #3 for a particular search term, they could see retaining the #4 spot for desktop searches, yet dropping down for mobile searches.
But it is clear, if you haven’t yet to meet your site mobile friendly, you probably want to bump that a little bit higher on the priority list and hope that you get your site transition to being mobile friendly before their mobile checker hits your site.
Jennifer Slegg
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Kim Krause Berg says
This is more of the Google Borg dictating to site owners and forcing them to make decisions that may or may not be necessary for them. One of my clients has data that clearly indicates his target market rarely uses anything but a desktop so he chooses not to have a responsive design. When faced with the prospect of a redesign, small businesses just don’t have the funds and live with they have. I really dislike this latest move by Google.
Jonathan Carpenter says
This shouldn’t effect your client if his market doesn’t use mobile devices. The Search Engine penalties only effect sites that are not mobile friendly when searched for by a mobile device. Shouldn’t affect your client at all from what I understand.
end user says
So will google give us an option to select non mobile search on phones? I personally hate “mobile” websites that cause me scroll scroll scroll, tap tap tap, hit this thing that look like some 4 bars which I didn’t know was a menu”.. I want real searches for the real content and not some site that might not have what I want but its gets higher seo because google believes its “mobile” friendly.