Was Google Mobilegeddon overblown?
I’m not seeing a big change in results. Are you?
Last month I eagerly looked forward to April 21. This was the day, Google told us, that it would start favoring mobile-friendly content in search results. It would have a “significant impact” on search results.
Has this had an effect on your mobile-friendly site? I can’t find much (if any) of a change on Reglike and in general searches.
Google stated it might take a few weeks for the results to be seen. It’s been a few weeks, and I haven’t seen them.
Now, I won’t let hubris suggest that Reglike is some big site that ought to have seen a huge jump. But I’m perplexed as to why searches on my mobile browser match those on my desktop and include lots of sites that aren’t adaptable for mobile browsers.
I’ve closely monitored searches for “Domain Name News” on my iPhone. Shortly following the mobile deadline, there was some jumping around between the top four results. Now they’re back to where they were:
1. DomainNameNews.com
2. DomainNews.com
3. DNJournal.com
4. Reglike.com
The top three aren’t mobile-friendly, as stated by the mobile tag in search results. Yet all three continue to outrank all of the mobile-friendly domain name news sites, and the results exactly match desktop search. (I’m using a logged out desktop browser, but my phone searches have data on who I am.)
This particular result shows Google’s strong reliance on either the domain name or the title tag.
Google Webmaster Tools has a handy chart showing your mobile traffic ahead of and following the change. Here’s mine:
The vertical line to the left represents the date change. Nothing noticeable for my site.
I looked at a few of the more common search terms for my site, as well as some more general terms. The results on mobile browsers are essentially the same as desktop, despite many of the sites not being mobile friendly.
Perhaps someone with more data and ahead of/following rankings can chime in. But it seems that the boost mobile sites get in mobile search isn’t as consequential as many had expected. At least not yet.
