A change to Google’s SEO policy may impact your website’s rank
April 21, 2015
This blog post is applicable to anyone managing a web domain, but is particularly intended to inform Shipwire merchants of an update to Google’s algorithm that will impact the way Goole ranks websites.
Starting April 21, 2015, Google will factor mobile-friendliness into its search results.
An algorithm will label sites as mobile-friendly (or not) and will use the information to determine a website’s rank in search results, which Googles says will have a “significant impact” in mobile search results worldwide.
According to Gary Illyes, Webmaster Trends Analyst at Google, ranking factor runs in real time and it works on a page-by-page basis. This means a few things:
- If you miss the April 21 start date, but soon after transition to a mobile-friendly page or site, it will be labeled accordingly and benefit from the algorithm as soon as it is re-crawled.
- If your pages are rarely updated and slow to be indexed, you’ll want to make the transition to mobile as soon as you can.
- Since the algorithm runs on a page-by-page basis, if some pages of your site are mobile friendly, they will benefit while other pages do not. This is important because certain page types are hard to make mobile-friendly. However, as long as the pages that link to them are mobile-friendly, you should still be able to surface them as needed.
In addition to factoring mobile-friendliness, Google is now using “information from indexed apps as a factor in ranking for signed-in users who have the app installed,” which will allow information these apps to be shown more prominently in search.
Read Google’s announcement here and use this resource to test your site’s mobile-friendliness.