Google Mobile Friendly Update Currently Doesn’t Differentiate Some Desktop Ranking Signals

Google’s mobile-friendly update is launching soon and we’ve learned that it runs in real-time on a page-by-page basis already. But also coming out of SMX West from Google’s Gary Illyes is that factors like page speed signals for ranking are based on the desktop version, not the mobile version.

We learned this back in November, where Google’s John Mueller said there are still many desktop signals used for mobile ranking, including page speed. But if you think about it, you may have a completely different site for your mobile site and the speed of the mobile site might be 10x faster or slower than the desktop version, so why would Google use the desktop signal for mobile ranking?

While this continues to be true today, Illyes said Google is experimenting with breaking out some of those factors on a mobile versus desktop basis. In some cases, it makes sense, such as with the page speed algorithm, the top heavy algorithm and other algorithms that are based on the construction of the pages themselves. But for algorithms like Penguin or Panda, it makes less sense to break them out on a mobile vs. desktop basis.

Again, Gary from Google said they currently do not break out those signals on a mobile versus desktop basis but they are indeed looking into it and experimenting with it.