How Hard Will the Google Mobile-Friendly Update Hit my Site? It’s Best Not To Find Out.

Google will begin to roll-out the Mobile-Friendly search ranking signal on Tuesday, April 21. How big will the impact of Google Mobilegeddon be on sites without mobile optimization? Finding out the hard way is not recommended.

On Tuesday, April 21, Google is rolling out a new ranking signal for search results. The search giant has announced this back in February. “Mobile-friendliness” is going to impact on mobile searches in all languages worldwide. A Googler said that this new ranking signal will have impact on more sites than the Google Panda and the Google Penguin update did.

If your site fails the Google Mobile-Friendly Test, than you might face Mobilegeddon this coming week. To take the mobile implementation of a site into account for search result ranking is a very tangible value. A good mobile implementation is good for users. If a site owner does not care for mobile users than the site is likely not a serious offering. These days there are tons of options to make a site mobile-friendly.

Which option is best, depends on several factors, including type of site, audience and budget. Sites on blog platforms like Blogger and WordPress can choose from plenty of mobil themes to get the job done.

How I4U News handles Mobile:

After dealing with in-house implementations based on responsive frameworks we opted to work with Marfeel. Their mobile interface service deliveries not only a very fast user experience, but maintains the full richness of the desktop user experience on smartphones and tablets.

If Google Mobilegeddon is going to have a noticeable impact on sites without mobile optimizations remains to be seen. The recommended way is though to not find out the hard way. The usual issue with Goggle’s negative ranking signals is that once a site gets hit, it takes time to recover from the association with the bad signal. It is not known yet how often Google will update the data on mobile-friendliness. Update: Initial tests show that mobile-friendly updates are fairly frequent. It takes at the worst case 3 days.

It is worth noting that the Mobile-Friendly ranking signal should only impact mobile searches and not desktop searches.

Google offers a Getting Started Guide to Mobile-Friendly websites here.