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Google Smartphone / Mobile Friendly Update Traffic Report

         

engine

5:11 pm on Apr 22, 2015 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Administrator 10+ Year Member Top Contributors Of The Month



We've seen the Google update starting to roll out, [webmasterworld.com] and there's going to be another week or two of mobile serps shuffling, along with the newly-mobile-friendly sites getting back into the SERPs. I think this update is going to run and run for many months, or even years if people are slow to update.

I'm interested in the real-world traffic benefits webmasters see from having a mobile-friendly site, or the traffic drops that webmasters are experiencing from not having a mobile-friendly site.

How is it impacting your site - positively, or negatively?

Do you get much mobile traffic? Perhaps you don't if your site won't work on a smartphone. In which case, you may see no difference.

If your site is mobile-friendly, and your competitors in the serps are not, how much of a benefit are your seeing?

Some may not want to admit their site is not mobile-friendly. Don't be shy, come on, tell us how it's faring. I have a non-mobile friendly site on the books and the stats show it's still sitting in the mobile serps ok, and, of course, the traffic is quite acceptable. Over the coming days and weeks i'm going to be watching that one closely as I want to know what i'm missing. NB, there is a mobile friendly update to that site coming, but it's not ready yet, for all kinds of reasons, so, in the meantime, it's going to be an interesting experiment.

vphoner

5:40 pm on Apr 22, 2015 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member Top Contributors Of The Month



One important factor came out from google yesterday:
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9. Will my site / page disappear on mobile search results if it's not mobile-friendly?

While the mobile-friendly change is important, we still use a variety of signals to rank search results. The intent of the search query is still a very strong signal -- so even if a page with high quality content is not mobile-friendly, it could still rank high if it has great content for the query.

[googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.ch...]
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What this tells me is that Google will not de-rank high quality content sites as much as we thought. This to me makes sense, as I don't mind pinching out the sidebars on a non-responsive site if it has the best content. Content rules over mobile friendliness, and it always should. If a non-responsive site stinks, then its bounce rate, pages read, and time on site will always reflect that already, and be ranked appropriately. Good, well designed mobile sites are a good idea, but not these ugly responsive site hacks that we are seeing people rushing to put up. They actually might hurt some people by increasing bounce rates. I have not seen any changes yet in rankings, but its still early.

EditorialGuy

5:47 pm on Apr 22, 2015 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member Top Contributors Of The Month



I haven't noticed any impact so far, but it's early days yet.

Background, since you asked: We have plenty of mobile-friendly pages (the most popular sections of our site have mobile versions), and mobile traffic has climbed at a faster rate than desktop or tablet traffic over the last year.

Over the past month, mobile pageviews have been about 25 percent of our total PVs. Mobile PVs now exceed tablet PVs by quite a bit, although mobile traffic doesn't begin to approach the level of our desktop traffic.)

FWIW, our first mobile pages were created about 2-1/4 years ago, and it was only fairly recently that they began getting a lot of traffic. Demand for mobile-friendly pages has obviously shot up over the last year or so. (Either that, or it took Google a long time to favor our mobile pages over the desktop versions in mobile search.)

ken_b

8:06 pm on Apr 22, 2015 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member Top Contributors Of The Month



It is probably too early to draw any conclusions.

But, until G announced this was coming I'd never done anything relevant to making my site mobile friendly and was pretty much stunned about how easy it was to do.

Still the mobile (phone) traffic had grown to about 12 - 18%. Tablets made up another 12-18%.

I made all of my pages mobile friendly (minimally but they all passed the mobile friendly test), and loaded them online April 1.

Since then mobile traffic skyroceted to as much as 40 - 45% and tablets dropped to 8-10%. That last bit seemed odd.

So the 21st comes and what's happened so far is this...

Mobile traffic has dropped back to the old levels and tablets have gained back to the old levels.

Keep in mind that this is a small 1600+/- page 15 year old site that never got updated past the 800x600 screen stage, so it worked fairly well on a newer phone anyhow, they just didn't see the ads on the right side of the page unless they scrolled sideways. Those ads have been moved or eliminated now.


.

engine

8:18 pm on Apr 22, 2015 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Administrator 10+ Year Member Top Contributors Of The Month



That's great feedback ken_b, and exactly what we need to monitor. Hopefully, those with a mobile friendly site should see improved traffic from smartphones.

courier

6:57 am on Apr 23, 2015 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



I created a new design in December 2012, mobile friendly from outset. Since then mobile traffic has grown significantly, but the important factor in this is mobile traffic does not convert well into sales. This month mobile traffic is up again, browser activity as follows during the past 10 hours.

Mobile Browsers: 48.6%
Tablets: 25.8%
Chrome 12%
Internet Explorer 9.4%
Firefox 2.4%
Safari 1%
others 0.8%

fathom

8:18 am on Apr 23, 2015 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member Top Contributors Of The Month



Engine can this thread report general industries?