Mobile Algo April 21st: Real Time And Page By Page Basis

[aakk9999]

Barry Schwartz, reporting from SMX West, said Gary Illyes of Google had stated that the new Mobile Algo will be page based and will kick in a 'real time'. Barry said:

This mobile-friendly algorithm doesn't seem to be run like Penguin where it is site-wide, impacting the whole entire site. It also doesn't appear to run in spurts or periodically like Penguin or the page-layout algorithm. So even if you do not have the time and resources to get your whole site mobile-friendly by April 21st, you should be able to do the most important pages first and work your way through the rest as soon as you can. The Google Mobile Algorithm Is Real-Time & On The Page Level [seroundtable.com]

And further, Google is currently using desktop factors and signals for mobile results, but, Barry says that according to Google's Gary Illyes:

...someone, somewhere at Google is playing around with the idea of using a separate mobile-friendly index for mobile results.

Interestingly, just a few days ago Neil (engine) predicted diversification of Mobile and Desktop SERPs in his Opening Post of the Google's Knowledge Graph:Knowledge-Based Trust: Estimating the Trustworthiness of Web Sources [webmasterworld.com] thread (emphasis mine):

We're just reaching a new phase in search, imho: These include new ranking signals of knowledge-based trust, and the expansion of Google's Knowledge Graph into other sectors, and the diversification of desktop and smartphone SERPs, which, up until now, have been very similar...

If going responsive or developing a mobile site is too big / too expensive task right now, perhaps you should convert your most important pages to mobile - you have 6 weeks until 21st of April!

[Kratos]

The problem here is the crawling of pages in sites with little PR and/or tens of thousands of pages that are ranking for long-tail keywords. Google can take months to re-crawl a page, so I can see this posing a problem for people with thousands of pages (e.g. forums or well-established news sites and blogs). It'd be great if Google could have in WMT some form of notification (from us to Google/Googlebot) that the site is indeed changing (or has fully changed) the design to mobile friendly and to thus try to crawl more pages per day. Perhaps Google is already implementing this into their crawling algorithm, but who knows with these guys as they dripfeed their information (the little they give).

[RedBar]

the new Mobile Algo will be page based

That's very interesting for me and my niche trade directory site. The original site name is example-example.com however I have been constructing the responsive site on exampleexanple.com (the same two words).

Some pages I already link to from example-example.com to exampleexample.com and they are being picked up nicely and indexed however there are many thousands of image pages that will not convert so easily therefore I was wondering what to do with them.

This gives me the answer simply by leaving the original as-is and constructing completely new ones on the responsive ... this is assuming I've understood this correctly?

[Kratos]

RedBar, what are you trying to do? Redirect your mobile users to the new site or redirect all traffic to the new site?

Ideally, you'd want to use the responsive design/CMS that you already have on example-example.com If you can't do this, then there are other options like having a subdomain that offers the mobile friendly design (not on a new site like you're doing!).

Can you not use the mobile-friendly CMS on your current example-example site?

[RedBar]

Can you not use the mobile-friendly CMS on your current example-example site?

Unfortunately not whatsoever.

Redirect your mobile users to the new site or redirect all traffic to the new site?

For the converted pages on the new site, all informational text, I am redirecting from the original site, the old site image pages which need completely reconstructing for responsive I am leaving as-is. This site used to get huge amounts of visitors for its images however with Google's image grab of a couple of years ago it's simply not worth the effort, concentrating on my B2B manufacturing sites is much more lucrative.

The way I have set it up any user can with one click navigate between old and new sites from any page.

[Kratos]

I see, but have you considered a subdomain of the old domain for the new site instead? Any reason for not doing that? Or are you simply going to start almost from scratch (with the text content from the old site) on the new domain as the images on the old site no longr bring in the good traffic?

[RedBar]

Yep, more or less what you are saying plus the days of making good advertising money, $10K+ per month, disappeared years ago for me.

I'm going to be concentrating even more on our realworld B2B manufacturing activities which generate millions per annum. Much of my industry has now opted out of Google believe it or not.

Why did I bother with the advertising? Because I did it all and the money went straight into my pocket, no one elses, apart from the taxman!

[blend27]

If you haven't been hard-codding all these years it should not have been a big deal. p2P - programmer to Programmer 101.

Ask your self a question, why did you choose the path of not having to learn the programming Lang your site is written in then? If you couldn't at the time what stopped you from hiring a competent developer instead of paying 2USD for the the plugin or even worst a freebee.

Yes, You just read that, yes you don like it, yes Mobile and HTTPS is here.

[Swanny007]

Real-time is good news for me. My second largest site is not responsive right now (table based layout). I had a responsive design mostly finished that I'm starting to roll out now, even though it's not "perfect".

I will continue to roll it out slowly (mainly static HTML pages plus a forum) and might not be done everything by April 21, but if I can get it mostly done, then the amount of punishment I get will be minimized. At least upgrading the forum will be fairly easy because of the header/footer files.

FWIW G Analytics shows 51% mobile traffic to the site, so Goog is just giving me a shove into doing something I was planning on doing anyway (OK they gave me a deadline where one did not exist before LOL).

[Zivush]

This is good news for me too and for those who worked hard on mobile friendly websites during the past months, especially responsive designed websites.
It is clear now that Internet goes mobile with less desktop based searches and more smartphone/tablets based searches - users put broad (less specific) search keywords instead of long tails.

[lucy24]

Perhaps Google is already implementing this into their crawling algorithm

Dunno about you, but I have to think that if they randomly crawl a few pages that haven't changed in ages, and suddenly find them changed, they will make it their business to re-crawl the rest of the site to see what's up. Not specifically about mobile-friendliness but just in general.

[n00b1]

Interesting to see how this plays out. I still think this could all go a bit OTT as I don't think there is a one size fits all (pages even) for what people want from their mobile experience.

[keyplyr]

So now we have a date. So many have been putting things off with a "wait and see" attitude. This should puts things into real-time perspective.

The announcement of diversification between desktop and smartphone SERPs is a real game changer since the last announcement suggested only that mobile-friendly sites would soon be seeing added weight in mobile search.

[RedBar]

So now we have a date.

Good, I was asking for this more than a year back so that everyone who wanted to know actually had a target IF they wanted to change.

I know a lot of UK small town businesses that have absolutely no intention of changing.

[diberry]

My sites are responsive. Unfortunately, the mobile test likes some pages but not others, and for the life of me I can't figure it out. I'm using a Genesis theme on Wordpress, which was designed around Google guidelines. It functions wonderfully on actual phones, but Google sees it very differently somehow. Can't afford to hire a designer to fix it.

[keyplyr]

Re: WordPress/Genesis - probably help to talk to others doing the same. See if you can find a forum specifically about this.

[lucy24]

for the life of me I can't figure it out

If you keep clicking the results for some individual category and then an individual page, you eventually get to a screen that gives you the exact numbers they took offense at. Sometimes it turns out to be something entirely different from what you thought. And, as with almost everything google does, there is more than one way to placate them.

[Ahsan Mushtaq]

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System: The following message was spliced on to this thread by aakk9999 - 1:45 pm on Mar 11, 2015 (gmt 0)

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I found a blog post where Jennifer Slegg [thesempost.com] shares the inside Gcoop from Gary Illyes on what you do and don't need to change

I have concerns with 2 points in this post

1. Gray illyas reiterated that responsive design does not have a ranking
benefit

and the 2nd point is where Gary Illyes answered on completely separate mobile index in the future

Google already has plans for this and there is a team already working on it. He isn’t sure what stage they are at, so Google has nothing to announce about it at this time.

I have multi regional responsive design website with more then 300 ranked keywords in google with following url structure

e.g
example.com
fr.example.com
it.example.com
pt.example.com and so on

I'm interested to move from responsive to mobile site but how can i deal with urls

m.example.com is fine

but for multi regional

m.fr.example.com
m.it.example.com
m.pt.example.com

is it fine? if not then how can i deal with this issue

[edited by: aakk9999 at 1:48 pm (utc) on Mar 11, 2015]
[edit reason] Moved from another location [/edit]

[diberry]

keyplyr, they have a dedicated forum and I've left a message there. So far no response.

Lucy24, are you talking about Webmaster Tools, which leads you to PageSpeed? I've done that many times, but there's so little correlation between the two tests that fixing everything PageSpeed recommends does NOT mean you pass Mobile-Friendly. Literally, I have pages that score 100% in the mobile user experience in PageSpeed, but do not pass in Mobile Friendly.

That's what's driving me crazy here. One Google test says I'm doing great, but the one that counts says I'm not, and refuses to give me any useful guidance.

[RedBar]

One Google test says I'm doing great, but the one that counts says I'm not

To be honest I don't give a stuff what G says. For me the code has to validate, for me I test it on as many devices as possible and all have been satisfactory, and for me the speed test is to use a mobile phone under standard 3G, not H, H+ or 4G.

If the site loads quickly and looks good that's all I need to know, I know my sites are very fast, I don't need a load of gobbledygook from G.

[netmeg]

I'm using a Genesis theme on Wordpress,

If you're on Facebook, there is a fairly active group there with site owners and developers, suitable to all levels of skills. It's a closed group, but it's easy to get let in.

[facebook.com...]

[diberry]

Piggybacking on what I said before: I have now made changes and am getting 100% perfect user experience from PageSpeed. The Mobile Friendly test still gives the same errors... but I'm pretty sure it corresponds with Webmaster Tools. In another thread, I mentioned that MF liked one page and then didn't like a virtually identical page, and I couldn't make sense of that. Well, that's what correlates with Webmaster Tool's reports on which pages have issues, which is somewhat hit or miss.

So I'm guessing next time Webmaster Tools crawls my site, the number of problem mobile pages will drop, and then the pages that have dropped out will also get a passing grade on Mobile Friendly. We'll see. If I'm right, this means we should just use Webmaster Tools and PageSpeed to do the fixing, and not even bother looking at the Mobile Friendly test. Surely if WT reports you're fine, then you're fine.

Thanks once again, Google, for always being so transparent and not at all vague or confusing or self-contradictory in helping us to meet your requirements. As always, it's such a pleasure working with you that I skipped through a dandelion field for the sheer joy of it. NOT. ;)

[diberry]

Sorry, I forgot to refresh my page and cross-posted with both of you.

RedBar, I want to agree, but despite ALL my non-Google promotion efforts, Google still accounts for 60% of my traffic. The best thing I can do at this point - and I'm doing it - is tell everyone I know on- and off-line that DuckDuckGo doesn't have a Knowledge Graph stealing traffic from websites, doesn't track you, doesn't have irritating ads, and does have quality results, so consider using it.

And at the end of the day, if I can validate on devices AND get along with Google, that's my goal. But given how the KG is designed to take traffic away anyway, I may just have to accept losses at some point.

Netmeg, thank you! I will definitely join that group.

[Swanny007]

For what it's worth, I've been manually converting my html pages one folder at a time to responsive. I've noticed within 2-3 days Google's mobile search results usually show "Mobile-friendly". Not always, but even now within a couple days you are good to go...

I'm not really worried much about Pagespeed's insights, as long as Google sees the site/pages as mobile friendly in the other tool I can tweak things later (using include files for template stuff/CSS).

p.s. As an aside, did you know that you can add a DuckDuckGo "site search" box and you have the option of disabling ads on the search results page? Yeah, I'm switching my site search boxes to DDG. More privacy, less ads. Hint, add <input type="hidden" name="k1" value="-1"> to your DDG site search box form element.

[diberry]

The plot thickens: using Pagespeed, I have fixed every issue save one. And that issue is super bizarre.

I allow commenters to link to their sites and to leave links in the comment bodies. For example, on screen you see the name "Jim" and it links to "http://jimswonderfulwebsiteofjimness.com". Even though all that's displayed is "Jim", because the link itself is too wide to display on a small phone, you get the "content wider than screen error" on the mobile test.

Really, Google? Somewhere on this planet, there's a phone that's going to choke on an invisible link? Really? Am I missing something?

I have no idea how to fix this non-problem. Yes, getting rid of links in comments altogether is a technical solution, but my commenters often leave helpful, non-promotional links that benefit all readers of the page, and I would hate to choke that practice. Besides, they'd probably just cut and paste the link, and that would probably be "wider than screen" too.

[rish3]

because the link itself is too wide to display on a small phone, you get the "content wider than screen error" on the mobile test.

Is it possible you, or perhaps some third party comment widget, are blocking some javascript or css resource that's making googlebot render things in a funny way? (robots.txt, or perhaps some other type of blocking?). I know if you block enough it tries to render as almost plain text, at which point long urls will cause that error.

[netmeg]

Are you using the native comments or a third party such as Disqus or Intense Debate?

[chrisv1963]

As an aside, did you know that you can add a DuckDuckGo "site search" box and you have the option of disabling ads on the search results page? Yeah, I'm switching my site search boxes to DDG. More privacy, less ads.

Ok, but DuckDuckGo image search is stealing/hotlinking our photos just like Google and Pinterest. Visitors don't need to visit our websites to view our photos. There is no way I will promote DDG. They are no better than the others and at one point they will abuse the free promotion they got for being a "clean" search engine.

[diberry]

Netmeg, I'm using native comments.

Rish, it did turn out I had an issue in robots.txt. Because I stopped trying to optimize for Google years ago, I didn't realize you had to give them access to virtually everything on your site now, or else things like this would happen. So yeah, you have probably nailed what the problem was.

chrisv1963, you can block your images from all search engines and Pinterest, so don't complain they are stealing your images if you've left the front door wide open. Just shut them out.

DuckDuckGo at least doesn't have a knowledge graph competing with some websites' content.

[honestman]

Bottom line. Is there any consensus among those who follow this closely whether websites that are not quite ready to be mobile-friendly due to time restrictions in the necessary and inevitable conversion will be hit for non-mobile search results? Mobile does not perform well for us as we are not mobile optimized, but tablet and laptop/workstation do, and our content has long been considered top-notch.

Is it form over content to such a degree that not performing well on the mobile platform can tank an entire authority site?

Forgive my ignorance on this issue, as I spend so much time trying to generate good content that our users appreciate, though I am perfectly aware of the need to go responsive or the like -- anyone who sees how the internet is used by young and older cannot be unaware. But the conversion process can be complex for those who are just not replacing a "skin."