{"id":40378,"date":"2016-03-17T08:30:44","date_gmt":"2016-03-17T15:30:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.bruceclay.com\/blog\/?p=40378"},"modified":"2016-06-01T17:27:10","modified_gmt":"2016-06-02T00:27:10","slug":"mobile-friendly-seo-ranking","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bruceclay.com\/blog\/mobile-friendly-seo-ranking\/","title":{"rendered":"Mobile Friendly SEO Ranking Boost Gets Boosted in May"},"content":{"rendered":"

Generally speaking, Google’s April 2015 mobile-friendly algorithm update (dubbed “Mobilegeddon” by the SEO industry) was sort of a bust. Months of talk\u00a0about\u00a0an organic ranking boost to mobile-friendly, aka mobile SEO<\/a> compliant, websites turned out to be mostly hype.<\/p>\n

\"mobile<\/p>\n

While the April 2015 Mobile-Friendly Update did spur many sites to make their sites better for smartphone users, there was not<\/em>\u00a0a lot of movement\u00a0across mobile search engine results pages, especially at the top of SERPs. The\u00a0mobile-friendly \u201cboost\u201d was seemingly\u00a0implemented as a tiebreaker among sites that were deemed to have equal ranking strength — a condition that rarely occurs.<\/p>\n

Google Turns Up the Volume on the Mobile-Friendly Boost<\/h2>\n

Another mobile ranking boost announcement has just come out of Google. The announcement says that they will be increasing the effect of the mobile friendly ranking signal<\/a> in May of this year:<\/p>\n

\u201c<\/em>Today we\u2019re announcing that beginning in May, we\u2019ll start rolling out an update to mobile search results that increases the effect of the ranking signal to help our users find even more pages that are relevant and mobile-friendly.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

And a later clarification: “If you’ve already made your site mobile-friendly, you will not be impacted by this update.”<\/em><\/p>\n

So, if you\u2019re mobile-friendly, you\u2019re safe. And if we take Google at their word, we can assume that there are no ranking boosts for different \u201cdegrees\u201d of mobile-friendliness.<\/p>\n

An example of degrees of mobile friendliness\u00a0might\u00a0involve Google favoring sites that have implemented AMP or responsive design — two mobile-friendly implementations that Google has gone out of their way to endorse — with more pronounced ranking boosts than other “mobile-friendly” sites.<\/p>\n

For now, it appears that the mobile-friendly status (and resulting ranking increase) is still a binary consideration; you either have it and enjoy the benefits or you don’t.<\/p>\n

Come May, we\u2019ll see if this latest change actually starts to shuffle the rankings more dramatically. We don’t suspect\u00a0that Google wants to have two sets of ranking results — one for desktop and another mobile — but that could be on the horizon. Certainly, this news is cause\u00a0to motivate any businesses still not mobile-friendly to move ahead toward that goal.<\/p>\n

Your Next Steps<\/h2>\n