Google Mobile Algo - May 2015 Roll Out

[seoskunk]

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System: The following 9 messages were cut out of thread at: https://www.webmasterworld.com/google/3007739.htm [webmasterworld.com] by aakk9999 - 4:48 pm on May 1, 2015 (gmt 0)

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Also, most of the hype came from the press

Google’s Zineb Ait Bahajji from the Webmaster Trends team was quoted as saying at SMX Munich this morning that the upcoming mobile-friendly ranking algorithm that will launch on April 21st will have more of an impact on Google’s search results than the Google Panda update and the Google Penguin update did.

Well Google fueled the press [searchengineland.com...]

[EditorialGuy]

OK, so a guy from the Webmaster Trends ventured an opinion at a conference. (And who knows--maybe he was right. It's too early to know.)

The official Google statement was far more measured, Of course, by the time Google's statement had been filtered by the "Telephone" or "Gossip" crowd, there was even more of a frenzy than there was when Google said that SSL was going to become a small signal in the ranking algorithm.

Three months from now, there will be a frenzy about something else. As the French say, "Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose." In the meantime, some of us are more curious about what's actually happening than about who hyperventilated first.

[keyplyr]

I think most of the comments so far have been reflective of traffic increases, or in this case no increase. That is understandable, but actually has nothing to do with an algorithmic edit. Google giving more weight to mobile-friendly pages does not necessarily translate into traffic increase or decrease. It may not impact some pages at all.

[eek2121]

One of my clients saw their already astoundingly high traffic double overnight from the algorithm (mobile went from 15-50%). This same client wasn't affected by any other change. Not minor at all.

[ChanandlerBong]

...working hard to make your site responsive and then seeing little change in the serps.

Well maybe you should be making your site useful and better for your users, not a search engine. Your username belies your real interests.

[seoskunk]

Your username belies your real interests.

Its just a username I wouldn't read so much into, I mean seo is kinda like selling snake oil these days.....

[randle]

seo is kinda like selling snake oil these days.....

An accurate analogy for sure.

[webcentric]

I mean seo is kinda like selling snake oil these days.....

That I can appreciate! Now I'm cured!

[engine]

According to Google's Gary Illyes,

"The algo is rolled out, but not all pages were reindexed yet so they don't have the new scores. Yet." [twitter.com...]

I haven't seen too much instability of late on the Mobile algo for what i'm watching.
I can see some non-mobile-friendly sites still doing well in the serps.

[Chrispcritters]

I rolled out a mobile-friendly version of my highest traffic site on 4/30. Due to the niche it does not attract much mobile traffic. Last year went from 6.5% mobile to 8.0% mobile (all mobile, not just Google organic search). Mobile organic search traffic from Google has doubled since January 2014. There was no noticeable change in mobile traffic leading up to and after the 21st. Rolled out a mobile-friendly version of the site on 4/30 and Google added the "Mobile-friendly" tag in mobile search in less than 24 hours. It's too early to know if the roll out of the mobile-friendly will have much impact so I'll follow up next week with some early indications.

[EditorialGuy]

For what it's worth, today is the second day in a row that our mobile traffic has jumped noticeably in comparison to desktop and tablet traffic. It's taken a while, but the mobile update seems to have kicked in for the queries that matter to us.

[kewlchat]

My traffic has more then doubled in the past week. I needed it because it was cut in half in November.

[Bluejeans]

For me, the update started to kick in Thursday. As a percentage of total traffic mobile edged from 20.44% to 22.78%, slightly higher yesterday. My site has been mobile-friendly since early March. Since then, my rankings on both desktop and mobile have creeped up slightly.

[Broadway]

Glad to see some benefited. I really didn't. Google announcing their upcoming algo had nothing to do with my finishing my transformation to responsive (although it did motivate me to complete it quicker), so no regrets there.

In terms of equating this to an industry wide change on the level of Panda/Penguin, hog wash. If I happen to be on page 1 of the serp's for some keyword, I can see how everyone else there might have converted to mobile friendly too. But there's no way a big algo change wouldn't have show up in the long tail where spurious "little guys" (who likely know nothing about going mobile) often rank well. A giant portion of my traffic is long tail and I see no changes in traffic levels at all.

I don't necessarily know what Google wanted from mobilegeddon but I'm sure they got it. And I'm sure it had very little to do with simply encouraging the web to become more mobile friendly.

While I don't really understand it, I rather imaging it had more to do with creating an excuse or opportunity where they can incorporate more "app" results in the serp's. Used by Google again.

[RedBar]

One thing is for sure, even Joe Public seems to have heard about this mobile thing since Friday night I heard a local pundit telling the owner of a hotel site I do that she had "better become mobile friendly" otherwise she wouldn't appear in the SERPs.

He was quite taken aback when she responded "Well you don't use your mobile whatsoever for my site since it's been mobile friendly for 18 months!"

[JesterMagic]

@ Bluejeans - Your increase is probably not related to the mobile update. Something else happened on April 30, not sure what to call it. See the topic "Google Updates and SERP Changes - May 2015" for more details.

[EditorialGuy]

While I don't really understand it, I rather imaging it had more to do with creating an excuse or opportunity where they can incorporate more "app" results in the serp's.

Why would they need to "an excuse or opportunity to incorporate more app results in the SERPs"? They can do that whenever they want. It's not like the mobile-searching public are going to be up in arms because apps get indexed.

It's more likely that Google's search team learned something from Panda: i.e., that it's less disruptive (in the negative meaning of that word) to introduce changes incrementally than to screw things up by making big changes in one fell swoop.

WYS may be WSG today, but it isn't necessarily WYS tomorrow.

[DXL]

I'm still not seeing a drop in traffic nor Google rank for any non-mobile-friendly sites that I manage. That goes for informational sites and business sites alike.

[EditorialGuy]

Our mobile traffic has continued to grow noticeably over the past few days. Yesterday (Monday), it was up about 20 percent over Monday, April 20, which was the day before the mobile algorithm's official rollout date. Desktop and tablet traffic were also up, but only by a few percentage points.

FWIW, we've added more mobile-friendly pages recently, and I've noticed that Google has become much, much faster in indexing the mobile-friendly page versions and incorporating them into mobile search. That's obviously one of the reasons for our boost in mobile traffic: We no longer have to wait a month for Google to display new mobile-friendly versions of popular pages in its search results.

[guggi2000]

Any growth you mention here must take into account that mobile browsing and search is growing anyway, regardless of the algo.
5% chance does not prove anything.

[guggi2000]

TYPO in previous post: *change

[guggi2000]

Is this thread and Mobilegeddon history?

[supercyberbob]

Yes.

[RedBar]

Would seem so, after three weeks of strange ups and downs I seem to have settled back to "normal", for the moment.

[EditorialGuy]

Is this thread and Mobilegeddon history?

Maybe, for the time being. But remember Panda, which has evolved quite a bit (with different impacts over time) since it was introduced more than four years ago.

[guggi2000]

WAIT! Yesterday at SearchEngineLand a quote from Gary Illyes (Google):

On mobile, sure, [since] UX [User Experience] is the base of the mobile friendly update.

Sorry if that has been discussed before, but could it be that April 21st was the rollout of the algo in terms of Signal Acquisition? In other words, maybe Google started to collect UX data beginning April 21st, which would lead to a much slower impact.

[RedBar]

Ok, I've been analysing some of my sites this afternoon and my traffic to my non-mobile sites is definitely down and by a substantial margin, year on year one site by 50% another by 30%.

These two sites entail massive rebuilds, they're year 99/00 CSS, honestly the way things are going I don't know whether I have either the drive or desire to do them.

[guggi2000]

@RedBar And your mobile sites?

[RedBar]

Fine, all showing slight to good increases which is probably why I hadn't noticed the decreases since I have been looking at the overall combined figures and, realistically, it's only now that I noticed they are showing a downward trend.

Decisions, decisions ...

[RedBar]

Decision made, I'm combining the two sites into one all-encompassing brand new html5 responsive site on my .com and will 301 the .eu to it...that's me not out to play for a couple of months or so!