In case you had forgotten or didn’t hear the warnings being shouted from rooftops, today is the day of days. Google will be rolling out their new mobile search algorithm, aptly nicknamed by industry professionals as “Mobilegeddon”, beginning today and most likely continuing for a few weeks.
If you don’t know what the new algorithm entails, Google will be penalizing websites that are not mobile-friendly in their organic search rankings for mobile and serving mobile-friendly sites higher in their rankings. More and more people are using their mobile devices for surfing the internet and making purchases, so the algorithm will have quite the impact.
Google has stated that this algorithm will have an even larger effect than the two algorithms that previously wreaked havoc on search results, Panda and Penguin. The algorithm updates in real-time and is page by page so the sooner you make your pages mobile-friendly, the sooner you will benefit from the algorithm. The actual scale and weight of this algorithm is currently unknown but we should be seeing the results of it sometime this week.
Will this affect you? While you used to be able to find out using Google’s mobile-friendly tool, Google has since retired the tool. Fortunately, there are readily available alternatives, including Lighthouse. All websites should be mobile-friendly in an era where technology is so often upgraded but if you have a fair share of mobile traffic or offer an online store, this could have a huge effect.
