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

[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.

[Guest]

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