Hi Everyone, I just to check if anyone is already feeling the effect of the google mobile-friendly site update on SEO ? Whether you somehow have big/sudden drop of site visits.
Please note that the websites which have traffic source from mobiles and are not mobile friendly, then there will be change their SERPs and hence those websites will lose traffic from mobile. However if there are websites which have no traffic source from mobile but these are mobile friendly then there will be positive impact in SERPs and these websites can have more traffic sources from mobile searches. Also note that the latest change in Google Algorithm will never affect the current SERPs for desktop sources. Here is the link of Google FAQs. http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2015/04/faqs-april-21st-mobile-friendly.html
Two major things to know here: - the update will take at least 1 week to fully roll out before any conclusions should be made - this is NOT a penalizing update or algo change. Its something that was bound to be included in the search criterion but websites that are not mobile optimized will not suffer. However websites that ARE optimized are expected to rise in ranks so this might shove your website down the pages. Mobile searches are something common nowadays so optimizing for such searches should be with high priority anyways.
Sites that already had a high percentage of their visitors using mobile devices probably already made sure their site is 'mobile friendly'. So if you are in a 'mobile friendly' niche, all the serious players within that niche probably made sure the site is ready for 'mobilegeddon'. We made several changes in different sites to get as many points on Google's speed insigths as possible without loosing on usability. We haven't noticed any changes yet but we also don't really have to rely on mobile (less than 5% of the visitors using mobile devices on all our sites). Their change may be major but the effect seems to be minor overall (at least for now). Take a look at it that way: 'Mobile friendliness' is just one raking factor out of ~200 (as far as I'm concerned). They probably don't want to give that one factor too much weight too soon I guess.
Google announced earlier this year that it was making a change to its search algorithms which would begin to factor in a website’s “mobile-friendliness” as a ranking signal – meaning that those sites which weren’t optimized for smartphones’ smaller screens would see their ranks downgraded as a result.
Thanks everyone for the answers. the reason I asked is that I'm a little bit concern with some clients with static website will be coming back to me soon.