Is Your Website Mobile Friendly? Google Will Penalize Websites On 21st
Waqas Khan Pitafi
DeltaOne | 25+ Years Experience | 700+ Software Engineers | $12.5M+ ARR | Transforming Minds & Lives with AI & HealthTech
Everyone’s got a website. You have a website. I have a website. She, he, they, everybody’s got a website. But, do you have a mobile friendly website? That’s the important question now. It will soon becoming the determining factor for the ranking of your website on Google. Those with a mobile friendly website will be ranked first and higher, while those with a website that is not mobile friendly will come afterwards on the ranking scale. This is definitely something to ponder over in the next 14 days on the 21st April, 2015! This is because you only have 14 days till what Chuck Price from Search Engine Watch calls the ‘Mobilegeddon’.
In a post on Google’s Webmaster Central Blog from 26th Feb, 2015, it was found that Google will officially change their algorithm and start ranking mobile friendly websites first and better than those that are not, in fact, mobile friendly. This would show the more mobile friendly websites to users, visitors, and customers, basically anyone who wants to visit your website. There is a benefit of this to some, while others’ websites could be in mortal peril, bringing a downfall to their enterprise by not showing their website first in the Google search results.
This is really good news for those of you out there who ensured mobile-friendliness of their website during its development phase. While their website may be new and probably of lesser publicity and ranking originally, Google’s new initiative could boost their rank and ratings considerably.
However, some websites, and consequentially, website owners, especially internet-based enterprises could go into mortal danger. By not showing up on the first two or three pages, maximum, customers and website visitors would not make more of an effort to specifically look for your website through the search results on Google for products and services available elsewhere on mobile friendly websites.
Fortunately, there is a webmaster tool that can help determine which parts and buttons or such need improvements and which issues are of greater importance at the moment, considering the 14 day limit before the initiative is acted upon by Google. You can use the W3C mobileOK Checker Validator to see if your website is mobile friendly or not. It gives a detailed and hierarchal report of your website with a score too!
How The W3C mobileOK Checker Validator Works
How the mobile friendliness checker works is that it has five sections.
- The result. It is color coded along with a percentage for friendliness. The higher it is and closer to green, the better. If its lower and closer to red, you are definitely in the danger zone.
- Page size report comes next; it’s best to keep your website’s pages’ sizes as small as possible.
- The network usage needed to load the website on any platform. It shows how many documents, stylesheets and images are used in the website and need loading.
- A detailed report is then given, ranking everything according to severity or category of failures in friendliness with mobile phones.
- The last section is a source listing of the website’s particular page that you check for mobile friendliness.
There are 4 levels of severity of failures, by which the aforementioned mobile friendliness checker ranks your website and what needs to be fixed and/or improved. The categorical report given will show you which problem is related to graphics of the website while which other problem falls under the web standard group.
How to Make Your Website Mobile Friendly
DevBatch is a web and mobile app development company. We have created over 200 mobile applications and a large number of web applications too. Get a free quote from our representative today and find out how we can help you keep your ranking if you are already among the higher ranked websites and how we can help improve that ranking if it was not good before and there is the danger of a decrease in ranking after 21st April. Hire our web app developer or UI/UX designer now to get a redesign or upgrade of the website and ensure an escalation in following, ranking, and possibly increase in annual revenue, too.
Then don’t wait till the deadline of 21st April, contact us now and get a mobile friendly website or web app!
about the Author: Waqas Khan Pitafi
Entrepreneur, Founder and CEO - DevBatch (Mobility, Apps), Senior InfoSec Consultant (MS, University of Liverpool)
Originally Published: Google and the Mobile Friendly Websites
Head of Digital Marketing at Emaar | Real Estate, Hospitality, Entertainment, Malls, Loyalty | Digital Marketing Consultant, Trainer & Speaker
9 年Just a small clarification here, "In a post on Google’s Webmaster Central Blog from 26th Feb, 2015, it was found that Google will officially change their algorithm and start ranking mobile friendly websites first and better than those that are not, in fact, mobile friendly." Here the link is only referring to "Mobile Search Results". So, there will be no impact of this update on "Desktop" results. As Zineb from Google on a panel at SMX Munich said 'NO' without hesitation about this misconception. He clearly said, ""We took this as another indication that the new index is related to a new crawler and/or a major change to the infrastructure they are using to parse, index, and evaluate mobile search results but not desktop results."
SEO Expert and Strategist
9 年Experts are saying that this impact will going to be huge because Google is working very hard to provide a better mobile experience for users in the search results.