Will Google Also Penalize Desktop Rankings If Your Site is Not Mobile Friendly?
-
Apologies if this question has already been answered. I was unable to find it. For desktop organic rankings: Will Google take into consideration mobile-readiness as a ranking factor?
Thanks in advance for any reply,
Kind regards,
Eric Darby -
Hi Eric,
You've received some great responses here! All are spot-on (as far as one can be answering this question at this time, that is.) You may also be interested to know that Dr. Pete has answered this question here in the forum at http://moz.com/community/q/google-s-mobile-update-what-we-know-so-far-updated-3-25. He actually posted a Q&A of common questions about the mobile update, taking new questions in the discussion thread, and updating the original Q&A post as new information becomes available.
Christy
-
I would work on the assumption that it will affect the rankings on desktop too and if you have time to make your site responsive in time then I would - it covers all bases then.
Also, as mobile searches are increasing it makes sense to go responsive as soon as you can.
-
I think that is the big unknown at this point. All we know so far is what Google has said “This change will affect mobile searches in all languages worldwide and will have a significant impact in our search results.”
The first part references it’s affect on mobile searches and then goes on to state “AND will have a significant impact on our search results”
Google doesn't have a separate index for mobile so that leads me to lean toward thinking that it will affect all searches desktop and mobile, however that is not to say that Google could simply filter mobile searches and have this only affect mobile. They are working on a mobile index however, so who is to say that won't be launched at the same time as this new update.
The fact that they have released so much information ahead of time means the update is probably going to be a huge one. In my opinion, unless the mobile index is launched at the same time, then there is no way this change won't affect desktop rankings.
-
The best answer we can give before the change is "not intentionally." It seems they intend to affect mobile rankings but some residual effect may trickle across to desktop rankings.
Just as an example, let's say pageviews were a ranking factor (I doubt they are directly one, but it's easy to visualise.)
Your mobile ranking drops as a result of not having a mobile friendly site. By your traffic dropping, your desktop numbers are no longer as good and boom, you drop as well.
It's not that straightforward (and again, pageviews are not necessarily a ranking factor) but that is the way it could trickle across. So for now, I'd say "We don't expect it to but it's possible."
-
Hi Eric,
There are some similar questions regarding the topic on the forum (unfortunately the search function Moz is not really best in class) - check also these questions:
http://moz.com/community/q/google-s-mobile-friendly-update-how-significant-is-the-impact-for-us
http://moz.com/community/q/google-mobile-algorithm-updateBasically, nobody knows what the effect is going to be. Most of the stuff I read about it seem to indicate that there will be no impact for desktop, but again we don't know. Google seems to indicate that it will have a big impact, so if you have a lot of mobile traffic, you risk to loose a lot.
The mobile friendly check is done is on page not site level - so you could try to work on your most important (mobile) landing pages and make them responsive / adapted for mobile. It doesn't really have to be state of the art - the goal is that the page passes the mobile friendly test - you can always improve later on.
rgds
Dirk
-
Hi Eric
It sounds like Google will only affect websites only on Google's mobile listings. So rankings on the desktop version of Google should be unaffected. They are doing this purely from a user experience perspective and are devaluing sites that aren't mobile ready for users on a mobile device,.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Any ideas why this site is being penalized?
http://www.my-french-house.com/ has been online since around 2004 and has nearly always been in the top 10 serps for terms like 'property for sale in france'. However, over the last 12 months we've been hit really hard by Google and have fallen dramatically in rank. Can anyone give any insight into what may have happened? As an aside, we've had no message in the Google Webmaster Console and have not contacted Google about the apparent penalty / penalization. Any help or advice would be greatly appreciated. Cheers Jim
Technical SEO | | jimpannell0 -
Authority site drastic ranking drop after google https switch. Please Help!
Hi Mozers. Since Google switched to the https version, our company website (http://we.register.it) indexing switched to the https version (https://www.register.it). After that the ranking on Google dropped for almost every keyword. The site is very old and got a great authority and PR 7. It ranked for same keywords for very long time On each page from years there is the correct meta rel canonical. No spam, and WMT is ok. Could you please help? The internal links are all in http, and in https. If you are https are in https (they are all relatives) No changes have been made and the subdomain is in that way from 8 years: the main url has always been http://we.register.it Google started this indexing switch around the 15 October
Technical SEO | | luca_cash0 -
Why isn't my site not searchable from google?
I am having a hard time figuring out why is it that when I search for my website name, it didn't show up in google's search result? Here's a link to my site. I've been twiddling for days looking for answers in my google webmaster tools. Here's a link of the crawl stats from google webmaster tool. As you can see it is actually crawling some pages. However my looking at my indexed status, I am getting 0 as you can see here (http://cl.ly/image/3G1R1p0b3k1P). I've double checked for my robots.txt and nothing seemed to be out of the ordinary there. I am not blocking anything. Any ideas why?
Technical SEO | | herlamba0 -
How to improve ranking of a website again, after being penalized by Google?
The ranking of our website has gone down in past 2 months. The reason,
Technical SEO | | TGA123
I believe is that we had more than 300,000 spammy comments posted on it
(the website is based on wordpress) so Google treated it as
un-monitored forum and penalized. We have deleted the older comments
and new comments can no longer be posted. Need suggestions on what else
should we do to rank better. Any advice would be very welcome.0 -
Google ranking my site abroad, how to stop?
Hi Mozzers, I have a UK based ecommerce site, that sells only to the UK. Over the last month Google has started ranking my site on foreign flavours of Google, so I keep getting traffic coming to my site from Europe, America and the far east that we could never sell to, and as a result bounce is going up and engagement is going down. They are definitely coming to the site from google searches that relate to my product type, but in regions I do not service. Is there a way to stop google doing this? I have the target set to UK in WMT, but is there anything else I can do? I worried about my UK ranking being damaged by an increasing overall bounce rate. Thanks
Technical SEO | | FDFPres0 -
Want to Target Mobile site for Google Mobile Version and Desktop Site for Google Desktop Version
I have ecommerce site with both mobile version and desktop version. Mobile version starts with m.example.com and full version starts with www.example.com I am using same content through out both site and using 301 redirection by detecting user agent vice-versa. My both sites are accessible to crawl by any google spider. I have submitted both sites's sitemap to GWT and mobile site having mobile sitemap xml, so google can easily recognize my mobile site. Is it going to help to rank my both sites as per my expectation? I need to rank for mobile site in Google mobile and ranking for desktop site in Google desktop version. Some of pages of my mobile site are started to appearing in Google desktop version. So how I can stop them to appear in Google desktop? Your comments are highly welcome.
Technical SEO | | Hexpress0 -
Should I Do On Site Optimization For A Website That Will Get A New Design
Would it be wise for me to start implementing onsite optimization changes on a website, such as the changing urls, adding in keywords in meta tags, meta descriptions, etc if the website is about to get a totally new design. For example if I wanted to change the url structure and onsite optimization features would the changes still be on the new website.
Technical SEO | | TSpike10