For the last few years, Google has been encouraging website makers to create sites that are mobile friendly. This led to the widespread popularity of responsive design practices all around the world. In fact, with the introduction of the mobile-friendly update Mobilegeddon, investing in mobile friendly websites became a necessity as any site not made in this way would suffer from poor ranking in the search engine result pages. Google recently announced on their Webmaster blog that at present they are all ready with their latest updates that are going to enhance the effects of their recently launched mobile-friendly algorithm.
Google’s announcement of algorithm update from May
On April 21st, 2015, Google launched an algorithm that was specifically meant for supporting mobile-friendly websites. Their latest update is also going to be a step in that same direction and is supposed to boost the impact of this previous algorithm launch. The new update that is going to be launched from May onwards will further increase the effects of mobile-friendly ranking signals that were brought about by last year’s algorithm. The sites that are already made to be mobile-friendly will not be impacted by this new roll out of algorithm update.
Once the algorithm update takes place, it will do so gradually which means that a sharp drop on ranking for non-mobile-friendly sites is unlikely to be seen. It is however difficult to tell at the present moment how much time it is going to take for the entire algorithm to roll out. Currently experts are assuming that it is likely to behave like the Panda 4.2 rollout that took place gradually. Google has however stated that the update is going to roll out from the beginning of the month of May.
Possible features of the new algorithm update
The new mobile-friendly algorithm update is going to be a page by page signal, which means that it is going to take its own time to assess and analyze each page separately. It is likely for this reason that the update is probably going to roll out gradually. Depending on the speed taken by Google for crawling and indexing each of the pages in a website, it can take a bit of time for the final impact to be apparent. While experts believe that this new algorithm update is going to be less intense than the impact created by Mobilegeddon, it will still have a lasting influence on sites that are not yet updated for mobile-friendly usage.
