Are These The Winners & Losers Of Google Mobilegeddon?

Last Tuesday, Google altered the ranking of its mobile search results to favor sites that were mobile friendly. Since then, we’ve been waiting to see if “Mobilegeddon” really would have a big impact. For many sites, it appears not. But we do now have a preliminary list of “winners and losers” from the change for some sites.

The data comes from Searchmetrics, which regularly tracks a huge number of search terms and how individual companies rank for these. To figure out who “won” and “lost” the most in the Mobilegeddon rollout, Searchmetrics looked to see which companies gained the most in visibility and lost the most, when it came to mobile search results.

Searchmetrics posted the results here; some have already changed, because Mobilegeddon is still continuing to rollout. This area at Searchmetrics shows the latest results, which I’m using for this report.

I’m not going cite any actual numbers in this write-up. That’s because Searchmetrics is giving out a “visibility” figure that isn’t well defined. We’ll follow-up more about these figures on Monday, when the regular work week begins.

I’ve also not put any companies into our main headline, because of the preliminary nature of the report and follow-up questions we have. But since the report is out there, and is going to be discussed widely in the search marketing space this weekend, I thought it worth highlighting some of it now.

Winners: Topping the list of winners for overall gain in visibility is TV Tropes, a resource for fiction writers, with the largest amount of gain in visibility. It’s followed by Entertainment Tonight, Foreign Affairs, JCPenney and Wired.

Huffington Post is actually listed as the biggest winner of them all, but it’s also listed as the biggest loser. I think it actually has had a net change, with Google swapping the visibility of its huffingtonpost.com domain in exchange for huffpost.com, when it comes to mobile.

Losers: Popular news sharing site Reddit topped the list of losers, followed by NBC Sports, Vogue, SongLyrics and Bloomberg Business. I suspect a bunch of people at Reddit are about to lose their minds over this. But the Reddit home page doesn’t test as mobile friendly, and that could be true of many other pages inside the site, as well.

The home pages of NBC Sports and SongLyrics didn’t test friendly either; I couldn’t even get Google’s mobile friendly testing tool to process SongLyrics. Vogue’s home page did test as friendly, but potentially it has problems with internal pages. As for Bloomberg, it’s the businessweek.com domain that reports as having a loss, but that redirects to bloomberg.com. Potentially, the loss might really be some type of domain switching going on.

Remember, even if you were hit by Mobilegeddon, Google’s constantly updating its mobile friendly data. Change your site to be mobile friendly, and potentially you’ll may regain lost visibility within a few days. See our Mobilegeddon FAQ for more advice and tips on this.

Expect more follow-up on Monday.