What if my site isn't ready for Mobile Armageddon by April 21st??
-
Hello Moz Experts,
I am fighting for one of our sites to be mobile optimized, but the fight is taking longer than anticipated (need approval from higher ups). What happens if my site is not ready by April 21st? Will it take long to recover, like Penguin? Or, will the recovery be fairly quick?
Say I release a mobile version of my site a week later. Then Google will have to reindex it and rank me again. How long will that take before I regain my traffic?
Thanks,
-
I, like Cocoonfxmedia, would like to think that given Google has to be aware that not everyone will be able to remedy their situation quickly, they'll go easy at first and ramp up penalties over time.
That said, I don't think anyone outside of Google knows the answer to your question. You're smart to push. I recommend you baseline traffic, conversions and rankings now, before the change, so you can use that push even harder should a negative impact be felt and you need evidence to support your request for approval.
-
I think Google is right to do this but for many businesses the cost to convert sites and possibly redesigns will mean it will take years for people to catch up. I just hope that Google don't start penalising sites straight away.
-
Google has said this change will run real-time, as far as I understand. So while being ready for April 21st is the best option, if you're ready the 23rd it shouldn't take you long to take advantage. Most people will NOT be ready by the 21st, especially those who don't do SEO, used to but stopped or have dodgy providers who aren't keeping up on it.
My advice to you & all of our clients is the same - mobile is the future and ignoring that is business suicide. Get mobile-ready as soon as possible and keep improving your mobile presence. You'll be much better for it in the long run.
As far as "recovery times" - well, I would think along the lines of what Google already is like. If you do a homepage title change it'll reindex in a day or two usually. If you change your contact page maybe a few more days. And if you change text on some old blog post, you may have to ping it directly or it may never get crawled.
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
-
Site Speed Testing Tools For Production Sites
Hi Guys, Any free site speed testing tools for sites in production, which are password protected? We want to test site speed before the new site goes live on top priority pages. Site is on Shopify – we tried google page insights while being logged into the production site but believe its just recording the speed of the password page. Cheers.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | brandonegroup1 -
Should I better noindex 'scripted' files in our portfolio?
Hello Moz community, As a means of a portfolio, we upload these PowerPoint exports – which are converted into HTML5 to maintain interactivity and animations. Works pretty nicely! We link to these exported files from our products pages. (We are a presentation design company, so they're pretty relevant). For example: https://www.bentopresentaties.nl/wp-content/portfolio/ecar/index.html However, they keep coming up in the Crawl warnings, as the exported HTML-file doesn't contain text (just code), so we get errors in: thin content no H1 missing meta description missing canonical tag I could manually add the last two, but the first warnings are just unsolvable. Therefore I figured we probably better noindex all these files… They appear to don't contain any searchable content and even then; the content of our clients work is not relevant for our search terms etc. They're mere examples, just in the form of HTML files. Am I missing something or should I better noindex these/such files? (And if so: is there a way to include a whole directory to noindex automatically, so I don't have to manually 'fix' all the HTML exports with a noindex tag in the future? I read that using disallow in robots.txt wouldn't work, as we will still link to these files as portfolio examples).
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BentoPres0 -
All urls seem to exist (no 404 errors) but they don't.
Hello I am doing a SEO auditing for a website which only has a few pages. I have no cPanel credentials, no FTP no Wordpress admin account, just watching it from the outside. The site works, the Moz crawler didn't report any problem, I can reach every page from the menu. The problem is that - except for the few actual pages - no matter what you type after the domain name, you always reach the home page and don't get any 404 error. I.E. Http://domain.com/oiuxyxyzbpoyob/ (there is no such a page, but i don't get 404 error, the home is displayed and the url in the browser remains Http://domain.com/oiubpoyob/, so it's not a 301 redirect). Http://domain.com/WhatEverYouType/ (same) Could this be an important SEO issue (i.e. resulting in infinite amount of duplicate content pages )? Do you think I should require the owner to prevent this from happening? Should I look into the .htaccess file to fix it ? Thank you Mozers!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DoMiSoL0 -
Why Google isn't indexing my images?
Hello, on my fairly new website Worthminer.com I am noticing that Google is not indexing images from my sitemap. Already 560 images submitted and Google indexed only 3 of them. Altough there is more images indexed they are not indexing any new images, and I have no idea why. Posts, categories and other urls are indexing just fine, but images not. I am using Wordpress and for sitemaps Wordpress SEO by yoast. Am I missing something here? Why Google won't index my images? Thanks, I appreciate any help, David xv1GtwK.jpg
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Worthminer1 -
Development site is live (and has indexed) alongside live site - what's the best course of action?
Hello Mozzers, I am undertaking a site audit and have just noticed that the developer has left the development site up and it has indexed. They 301d from pages on old site to equivalent pages on new site but seem to have allowed the development site to index, and they haven't switched off the development site. So would the best option be to redirect the development site pages to the homepage of the new site (there is no PR on dev site and there are no links incoming to dev site, so nothing much to lose...)? Or should I request equivalent to equivalent page redirection? Alternatively I can simply ask for the dev site to be switched off and the URLs removed via WMT, I guess... Thanks in advance for your help! 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | McTaggart1 -
Backlinking 3 sites from same domain and backlinking main site too
Hello, we have 4 sites, in which 1 is a main site and rest 3 are niche sites All these 3 sites have dofollow links to main site from home page We got a high quality backlink - through which all 3 niche sites have got it from that domain Is it worth to add backlink from that domain to main site too, despite the fact the 3 sites already have recvd it and they all link to main site many thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Modi0 -
How does Google determine 'top refeferences'?
Does anyone have any insight into how Google determines 'top references' from medical websites?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline
For example, if you search 'skin disorders,' you'll see 'Sources include <cite>nih.gov</cite>, <cite>medicinenet.com</cite> and <cite>dmoz.org</cite>'--how is that determined?0 -
On-Site Optimization Tips for Job site?
I am working on a job site that only ranks well for the homepage with very low ranking internal pages. My job pages do not rank what so ever and are database driven and often times turn to 404 pages after the job has been filled. The job pages have to no content either. Anybody have any technical on-site recommendations for a job site I am working on especially regarding my internal pages? (Cross Country Allied.com)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Melia0