Google Penalises Non Mobile Sites

According to Google’s announcement on Webmaster Central blog, websites that are not mobile friendly may be penalised by the new algorithm change.

“ Starting April 21, we will be expanding our 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 our search results. Consequently, users will find it easier to get relevant, high quality search results that are optimized for their devices.”

In other words, websites that are mobile compatible will be given lower rankings in Google ‘s search results, whereas the mobile websites will be marked as more relevant and supreme.

With as much as 35% of all online traffic coming from mobile devices it seems like a very logical step to improve the experience for users accessing webpages via their mobile devices. The new algorithm determines whether the website is mobile-friendly or not and ranks this webpage according to its compatibility with mobile devices. In addition, this algorithm is combined by over 200 factors of webpage ranking including text readability, font size, loading speed, functionality, blocked URLs and images with restricted content.

According to research from eMarketer, UK adults are spending more time browsing on mobile devices rather than laptops or PCs. The statistics for adults in the UK this year are an average of 2 hours 26 minutes spent on mobile. This is up 27 minutes from 2014 and an almost fivefold increase from 2011. Although PC browsed websites are still leading internet traffic, mobile traffic is likely to surpass PC traffic within couple of years.

If you don’t have a mobile website there is a very simple solution – get in touch with your IT team or digital agency and get a one. This will benefit your website ranking in the Google search engines as well as provide your customers a better browsing experience.