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Recently Google announced, Starting April 21, they will be expanding the use of mobile-friendliness as a ranking signal. This change will affect mobile searches in all languages worldwide and will have a significant impact in your search results.

This means we all need to prepare for (cue dramatic music) MOBILEGEDDON! Mobile optimized websites pages are going to be a part of Google’s Ranking Signal and certainly will affect mobile searches after the update rolls out.

Get Prepared for MOBILEGEDDON

Google has been encouraging webmasters to get mobile optimized website from years including speed test and responsiveness tests within Google Analytics account. Thanks for the official update, this clearly state “Ranking in mobile search will change April 21^st”. So, if you want to continue driving searches to your site, you’ll have to be sure you have a mobile-optimized site. Non mobile sites on the web could see significant decreases in search visibility..and ultimately traffic.

How to Prepare

It’s critical time to consider mobile-friendliness for those who have not implemented it yet, you won’t need to worry much if already have mobile optimized website. Few steps to consider for those implementing now:

• There are few ways like getting subdomain, m.domain.com and responsive designs to make your site mobile friendly. Responsive designs have become trend as they don’t require special SEO considerations, but if you have separately hosted mobile version of the site, ensure to utilize canonical tags pointing to the desktop URL for duplicate mobile pages. Don’t use canonical tags on unique mobile content. This should pretty much control duplicate content issues for your mobile version.
• Check if Google’s bots can crawl your mobile site. You should able to see crawl stat’s within Google’s Webmasters Tool.
• Check each individual page of your site on a mobile device to ensure responsiveness for user experience. Just because your home page is mobile-friendly doesn’t mean the rest of your site is.

Google’s update looks specifically to target better mobile user experience as 60% of the searches being performed on mobile devices. We are not sure about how much impact search results will have, but if you don’t have a mobile optimized website version in place by April 21 (Mobilegeddon), your search visibility could have a serious setback.

Helpful Resources:

Check if your current website is Mobile Friendly
See how Google see’s your Website
Webmasters Central Blog

The Bottom Line

Mobile viewing is growing each day. Just look around and notice how many are staring down at their phone or tablet. If you want to stay relevant with your customers and keep your hard fought Google Ranking, you have to be sure you have a mobile optimized site to avoid (cue dramatic music) MOBILEGEDDON!