Google Mobile Friendly Update - Two Months On

25-06-2015Tags: SEO, Websites

When Google rolled out its mobile-friendly update in April 2015, many experts argued it would dramatically impact mobile search rankings of websites not deemed to be 'mobile friendly.' However, two months on and the results are not as substantial as predicted.

To assess the impact of the mobile ranking algorithm, Searchmetrics conducted a before and after study in which they analysed the change in Google search rankings for more than 100,000 webpages against a database of 10,000 keywords. The study, which analysed the first three pages of search engine results (SERPs), highlighted two key trends:

3% more mobile-friendly webpages

The share of webpages that Google considers to be mobile-friendly increased by 3% after the update, accounting for 71% of the total. Whilst pages deemed not to be mobile optimised dropped a corresponding figure to 29%.

+0.2 increase in average position

Secondly, the study found that the average change in ranking position of webpages deemed not to be mobile-friendly fell by 0.21 after the mobile-friendly update. Therefore, the average position (against the 10,000 keywords tested) for mobile optimised webpages increased by 0.2.

"While these don't look like high numbers, we do consider this a significant change, given the large volume of keywords analysed," said Marcus Tober, CTO & Founder of Searchmetrics.

"This is especially true as we only included those webpages that have remained in the top three search results pages after the Google mobile-friendly update."

"If you add in the non-mobile friendly pages that have complete dropped out of the top three pages, the average loss in rankings would have been much higher."

Is your website mobile-friendly?

To find out whether your website is mobile optimised, and learn more about the criteria, visit Google's Mobile Friendly Test today.