“Mobilegeddon”- The wrath of Google
Come April 21, 2015 Google will be rolling out with its new mobile focused algorithm. What does that mean to the everyday Joe? Not a dang thing. What’s that mean to every SEO around the world? EVERYTHING! What this Google algorithm update is, is to force website owners and SEOs alike to make their site easily accessible on mobile devices. Since more and more people are using their smart phones to search the internet Google is forcing website owners to accommodate these users. Now this isn’t an evil act by the search engine giant, in fact, quite the opposite.
“Mobilegeddon” The Bad
Most people like their bad news first, and I’m no different. “Mobilegeddon” will affect every website Google indexes, and if your website is not optimized to be viewable on mobile devices, look for your rankings to drop significantly. From my understanding the SEO drop off will only affect mobile searches, but still, with as many people who are on their mobile devices today would you want to miss out on that action? I didn’t think so. There are many ways to get your site to mobile friendly status, but they’re not going to be the most time efficient nor are they going to be the most cost efficient.
- If you’re a WordPress user I would recommend using WPTouch as they have a free version of their plugin in the WordPress repository.
- If you’re not a WordPress user, well I’ve got some not so pleasant news, you may have to hire a web developer to update your site to work with mobile devices.
- If you’re code savvy, I would recommend the Bootstrap Framework as it’s built as a mobile first framework. It’s very easy to use and has a lot of cool features.
“Mobilegeddon” The Good
There is silver lining to “Mobilegeddon”, Google is promoting a good user experience across all platforms. Since they are the main hub that everyone goes to for information, they want to make sure that the information they’re pointing people to will be able to be accessed from any device in a speedy efficient manner. Is that so bad? They’re looking out for the interest of the greater good, and it might be time to modernize your site anyway.
Where I believe Google did go wrong is announcing it so close to the algorithm roll out date. There are sites out there that take a while to make mobile-friendly such as e-commerce sites but where there’s a will there’s a way.