Google's Mobile Update: What We Know So Far (Updated 3/25)

[CDUBP]

One thing you didn't cover that I'm curious about is: Would it be better to serve a separate mobile page or to make the entire website responsive?

[MonicaOConnor]

Right now, Google is saying there is not a difference between the two, however, I think most people would say that Responsive is the way to go.

I think the only thing that could hinder that thought is if the responsive design couldn't produce enough functionality or visual appeal to have a good user experience. Some stores just have too many product options to really make a responsive design work, so they use a mobile version of the site. Google likes uniformity, which I why most people prefer the responsive design.

[RyanPurkey]

Another consideration: if someone links to a responsive site--whether it was from mobile or non--the link would remain the same. That should help as well. That way there's less need to prompt users to "Switch to Desktop" or vice versa.

[SanjidaKazi]

Agreed Monica

I'm looking forward to this update lol!

[Orbiteer]

Hey, Pete!

Long time no see! (This is Amanda from Orbit posing as Andy

Thanks for the Q&A's. I have another quick question. If a site is fully fluid and it's still not passing Google's Mobile-Friendly test through their tool, will Google not label this as "mobile-friendly" in search results?

I've been running into this on a few client sites and the actual "issue" is usually within a blog post on the website. An image not sized to standards or something small like that or the font size is too small.

Just wondering what your thoughts are on that? Thanks much!

Amanda

[Christy-Correll]

Nice, Travis! I'm eager to find out how this project turns out. (I'm sure our YouMoz readers would be as well, ahem.)

[Christy-Correll]

Hi, Amanda! In the cases where you have identified the issue to be within a particular blog post, do the other pages on the same site pass the mobile-friendly test when you enter the URLs one at time? And are any of those same pages showing the mobile-friendly label in the mobile SERPs?

[Christy-Correll]

Dr. Pete, thanks so much for putting this Q&A together. I particularly love your no-nonsense answer to whether this will be a boost or a demotion (Q4). "...practically it doesn't matter that much and the difference can be very difficult to measure. If everyone gets moved to the front of the line except you, you're still at the back of the line." Well said!

[Dr-Pete]

Unfortunately, I'm hearing reports that different validation methods are producing slightly different results. It's likely that some pages that don't pass the test will be ok, but I hate to tell anyone to just hope for the best. You might also want to check the mobile usability report in Google Webmaster Tools.

[Bryan_Loconto]

Great post Doc! Tons of takeaways here

But I mean... at the end of the day are there really people out there just waiting around for Google to say "HEY EVERYBODY! Its time to make your website mobile friendly now!!"

And are we really doing things based on what Google wants us to do or are we gearing our sites for our USERS? Google is an important piece of the puzzle of course but I feel that staying in the good graces of our visitors far outweighs anything else.

[RyanPurkey]

I think these changes have the backing of tons of user data--way beyond what we would have access to individually--and a lot of sites are completely in the dark still about mobile usability.  Like the majority of sites on the web are happy with the status quo as long as it's working for them.

People do however look at search traffic, income, etc. When they see a sudden drop in that, they'll come around asking why. In the long view many more sites will become much more user friendly after this change.

[Bryan_Loconto]

Great point Ryan! I guess my initial thoughts on it are not the same as the average website owner that just goes along for the ride and hopes for the best. But thinking further into it, you're right. I am sure there are plenty of people out there just getting by with what they have. Makes perfect sense

[Bryan_Loconto]

Oh and my last follow up question is... when will Moz be going mobile? Hopefully on or before April 21st

[Dr-Pete]

It can be a tough call with mobile - beside the investment itself, some sites have huge mobile user bases and some have little to none. Google is essentially making the call for every site, and that's a bit simplistic, IMO. So, now, if you know for a fact that only 1% of your audience is mobile, you may well have to make the switch anyway.

Now, it's easy to say (and Google will) "Well, that's good for users", but it costs time and money. What if the resources spent on making your site mobile, when that's a tiny part of your audience, could be spent instead on other usability improvements that impacted a larger audience. I find Google has a way of turning complex scenarios into a kind of dogma, personally.

[Joe.Robison]

Forgive me if this is already listed somewhere else - but why isn't Moz optimized for mobile? I imagine you guys are working on it but there might be huge technical obstacles?

[Dr-Pete]

Yes I hate to say it, but this is a "Do as we say and not as we do" scenario. We're a 150-person company now with multiple engineering priorities and the short answer is that mobile has gotten back-burnered for too long. We hope to have the blog mobile fairly soon (no ETA yet), but product will be a bigger challenge.

Right now, our audience is not heavily mobile, but that's a difficult bit of data to crack. Our audience isn't mobile, in part, because we've trained them not to visit our site on mobile. So, it becomes really hard to predict how many people would visit us on mobile if we were more mobile-friendly. Philosophically, though, we're supposed to be thought leaders in the industry, and I personally feel we've dropped the ball on this one.

This is a matter of internal debate, and I do not speak for everyone. I also recognize that we do have many engineering challenges, like any company our size, and sometimes we make tough choices. At Moz, we try to err on the side of building a better product when we have a choice, and sometimes that means the overall site gets improved slower than we'd like.

[RyanPurkey]

True. It'd be interesting to know if there was a dogma tipping point. Plenty probably goes into it--like bounce rate of mobile searchers encountering non-mobile sites, load times, chrome crashes, Android stats, Analytics data, etc. Eventually though all that data is going to be pretty clear one way or the other.

[Orbiteer]

Search Engine Land came out yesterday saying it will be a page by page basis, so I guess that answers my question.

From Google:

As we mentioned in this particular change, you either have a mobile friendly page or not. It is based on the criteria we mentioned earlier, which are small font sizes, your tap targets/links to your buttons are too close together, readable content and your viewpoint. So if you have all of those and your site is mobile friendly then you benefit from the ranking change.

But as we mentioned earlier, there are over 200 different factors that determine ranking so we can’t just give you a yes or no answer with this. It depends on all the other attributes of your site, weather it is providing a great user experience or not. That is the same with desktop search, not isolated with mobile search.

[Orbiteer]

Thanks for the response! See my comment below.

[Travis_Bailey]

Well, it looks like they went dark. No response to email or calls. I even developed a child theme for them.

Ah well, now to contact their competitors. I'm not doing that out of spite, rather I found an interesting situation. I would very much like to see how something like that changes things.

A few CSS tweaks, a banner redesign, and I can have my case again. Fortunately there aren't any contractual obligations involved with the first instance.