Huge variance between mobile and desktop rankings, trouble?

[JS_Harris]

Over the past month I've seen my mobile traffic surge by over 50%. The site is fast and well optimized for mobile but it's only recently that my mobile traffic exceeded the traffic I get from desktop. A check in Google's console shows that my articles are extremely well ranked in mobile, across the board, but are lagging behind on desktop.

Some extreme examples include a #3 spot on mobile with a #87 on desktop and many top 10 mobile vs not even top 50 desktop results. I thought this was normal since there are likely a lot of sites not optimized for mobile but it's across the board. I don't have a single page that is ranked more highly on desktop anymore.

Could this be a sign of some sort of penalty for desktop? It sincerely feels like my mobile pages are well ranked and my desktop pages are falling off because they used to be that well ranked as recently as December. Has there been a major shift since then affecting only one type of traffic rankings or the other?

It's very clear that there are two different sets of SERPS at this point, one for mobile and one for desktop.

[EditorialGuy]

There's obviously more competition for desktop than for mobile (since many sites don't have mobile-friendly pages), so maybe that's one reason. Another possibility is that Google has begun to apply different standards to desktop than to mobile. (Maybe "RankBrain" is playing a role here?)

It stands to reason that mobile and desktop search results should be different if user data shows that people search, read, shop, etc. differently on mobile devices than on desktop devices. Over the long haul, should we be surprised if Google recognizes that audience habits, expectations, and intent are just as important to "mobile friendliness" (and to "desktop friendliness," for that matter) as how a page looks or loads on a certain type of device?

[tangor]

We're looking at numbers---huge numbers---of mobile leapfrogging over desktop. Viewed from this point (and phones are increasingly more powerful and yet much cheaper than desktop) that for many their only access to the net is a phone, these numbers are not that surprising.

[keyplyr]

My mobile traffic passed desktop about 3 or 4 months ago... and on weekends, it's 90% mobile.

This tells me most of my weekday visitors probably surf from work and on weekends they use their own mobile devices. Also it may concur the stats about dying desktop/laptop sales.

[EditorialGuy]

Desktop still rules for our site. Mobile certainly has grown, but our desktop and tablet traffic numbers have been growing at an even faster pace over the past few months.

[RedBar]

My mobile traffic passed desktop about 3 or 4 months ago... and on weekends, it's 90% mobile.

Wow! My mobile traffic has been almost static v desktop for the past 9-10 months whereas about a year ago I was expecting mobile to surpass desktop during summer 2015 and, in fact, mobile actually seems to be going backwards for me at the moment.

Two things I do see for me is that mobile gets 50% more PVs than tablet.

How much can we trust the mobile figures since I am still not convinced that Google know the difference between tablets and mobiles running Win 8.0/8.1/10?

[EditorialGuy]

Two things I do see for me is that mobile gets 50% more PVs than tablet.

For us, the ratio isn't quite 2 to 1, although we do get considerably more mobile traffic than tablet traffic.

Interestingly, our tablet users rank highest for "pages/session" and "average session duration" (with desktop second and mobile third). They also rank lowest (by a lot) for "new users."