Mobilegeddon: Google Confirms Mobile Friendly Update Live In Some, But Not All, Data Centers

On Tuesday, April 21st, Google announced they began rolling out the much anticipated Mobile Friendly Update. We asked the day after if webmasters started to notice the rollout yet or not – some did, some tracking tools saw early signs, but many webmasters said they saw nothing.

As time goes on, as expected, more and more searchers and webmasters are claiming they are seeing the impact of the mobile friendly algorithm in the mobile search results. But many are still not seeing it.

Google’s John Mueller confirmed this morning in a live hangout on Google+ at the 4:40 mark that the roll out has 100% begun and is actually completely live in some of the many Google data centers.

That means that some searchers may be seeing the mobile friendly search results on their mobile searches, while some may not. It also means you may see it one hour and not the other hour. John Mueller explained that the full roll out can take a week or more, so be patient. But if you see a different mobile search result experience, that is likely because you are seeing the roll out on your mobile device.

Here is what John Mueller said:

It’s definitely rolling out. I know in some of the data centers its already rolled out completely. So that is something where I think you will probably see that change over the course of a week, maybe a week and a half – something like that.

From the first day to the next day, I don’t think you’ll see a big change. But if you compare last week to next week, then you should see a big change.

And I’ve seen some blog posts out there have noticed it’s different, and tried to document the difference between the desktop results and new mobile results. So there are definitely people noticing it.

SEO Clarity has been updating their data set showing the impact thus far on the mobile search results and as time goes on, those numbers show a larger and larger impact.

Here is the video embed of John from Google:

For more on this, see our mobilegeddon FAQs.

Postscript: SEOClarity updated their post sharing they are now seeing a 5.1% variation on April 24th:

About The Author

Barry Schwartz

Barry Schwartz a Contributing Editor to Search Engine Land and a member of the programming team for SMX events. He owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics. Barry's personal blog is named Cartoon Barry and he can be followed on Twitter here.