Get with the Global, Let’s get Mobile

Could we see another Google algorithm change coming soon?

If you haven’t yet made your website mobile friendly, it’s time to come out from under your rock and get on board with the rest of the world.

Google has recently been sending out a huge amount of notifications to webmasters that have been missing the boat with optimizing their websites for mobile users. Simply telling them, your site is not “mobile-friendly” and will be displayed and ranked accordingly for smartphone users.

Although this seems like a verbal slap on the wrist, I feel Google is foreshadowing yet another Google algorithm change for the near future. One could assume, by eliminating non-mobile sites from mobile search entirely (hopefully), but the company has not yet made any such announcement. Clearly, with the number of smartphone users continually growing it’s more important now than ever to have your site mobile friendly.

Not only so you can rank well with Google, but so that the users of your site don’t have to go through the frustration of dealing with unreadable content and tiny links. Nobody wants to take their second hand off the wheel to zoom in on your content. If it’s me, and I pull up that site, you can most likely assume I’ll be contributing to your bounce rate.

To help with this frustration, Google introduced the broken mobile site penalty in 2013, and last year they released a statement saying they’re experimenting with adding a mobile friendly label to its mobile search results. So with this sending of mass notifications to sites and re-sending to sites that are knowingly not mobile friendly, I smell a bigger change on the horizon.

Hopefully, this is leading up to new mobile exclusive solution for mobile web browsing. Here’s an example of the messages that are being sent to webmasters. Note the “Fix this now” label.

Sounds like a final warning to me.