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Google’s Mobile Friendly Algorithm A Week Later: Was It Really Mobilegeddon?

Thus far it seems that Google's mobile friendly algorithm, commonly known as Mobilegeddon, has not been all that significant.

Barry Schwartz on April 28, 2015 at 11:54 am

For the past week or so, we have been heavily covering the Google mobile friendly update, a new Google algorithm that launched a week ago today, aimed at significantly changing the mobile search results to give preference to mobile ready web sites over non mobile ready web sites.

But a week after the launch, has it really been such a significant update? Thus far, not really.

Google did confirm that the roll out began on Tuesday, April 21st. Some actually began noticing shifts in the mobile results as early as Wednesday, April 22nd. But those shifts were not significant. We even published an early set of the top winners and losers for the mobile friendly update.

There are several SEO metric companies tracking the update and for the most part, they are not seeing huge shifts in the Google mobile ranking algorithm, just yet. We know it can take over a week, maybe even two weeks, to fully roll out. So maybe we just need to wait longer?

Dr. Peter Meyers from Moz has been keeping a log tracking the mobile search results rankings for a set of top keywords and he said “so far, the big day was April 22nd, and it wasn’t that big.”

Marcus Tober from SearchMetrics has been watching also, he gave us the winners and losers data. He declared that “Mobilegeddon is here” and said “there are some significant changes visible in the data” but it has not fully rolled out yet.

Ryan Heuser from seoClarity also has been tracking the changes and on March 24th said there was a 5.1% variance day-over-day with the mobile Google search results.

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The webmaster community, as a whole, hasn’t been too impressed with the level of significance in the mobile results. Meaning, most are not noticing significant changes to the mobile search rankings yet. Again, that might change but based on my tracking of the SEO and webmaster community, overall feedback is low around mobile ranking changes. I even posted a poll asking webmasters if they notice a change and the majority said no, they do not see a mobile update going on – at least yet.

That being said, there is still time to make your site mobile friendly. See our Google mobile friendly FAQs around the most common webmaster questions on this update.

About The Author

Barry Schwartz

Barry Schwartz is Search Engine Land's News Editor and owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on SEM topics.