Google Mobile Algorithm update

[MarcelMoz]

Hi there,

On April the 21st Google seems to going to update their Mobile algorithm. I have a few questions about this one.

• Our current mobile website is very mobile friendly.
• We block all mobile pages with a noindex, so the desktop pages have been indexed on mobile devices.
• We use a redirect from desktop page to mobile page when someone hits a result on a mobile device.

My gut tells me this is not April 21st-proof so I'm thinking about an update to make this whole thing adaptive. By making the thing adaptive, our mobile pages will be indexed instead of the desktop pages. Two questions:

• Will Google treat the mobile page as a 100% different page than the desktop page? Or will it match those two because everything will tell Google those belong together. In other words: will the mobile page start with a zero authority and will pages lose good organic positions because of authority or not?
• Which ranking factor will be stronger after April 21st for mobile pages: page authority or mobile friendliness? In other words: is it worth ignoring the 21 April update because the authority of the desktop pages is more important than making every page super mobile friendly?

Hope to get some good advice!

Marcel

[MarcelMoz]

Hi Dirk,

That sounds great. Thanks for your help, I am going for action on this solution.

Marcel

[DirkC]

Marcel

with this setup Google considers your mobile site as the mobile view of your desktop site so in terms of authority it should not have an impact on authority. Most sites we have in this setup have same rankings for mobile & desktop searches.

rgds

Dirk

[MarcelMoz]

Hi DC1611 & Matt-POP,

Thank you very much for your response. This one is clear to me, I have exactly 1 month to fix this. Mobile traffic plays a big part in our daily revenue so this is serious.

@Matt-POP: your advice is to go for responsive but I rather go for a canonical/ adaptive solution because a responsive website is not really an option (causes lots of other 'challenges'). Would you also advice to go for the canonical/adaptive way? The idea to exchange links in the source between mobile and desktop. Is will look like this:

The bold parts will be filled in dynamically.
So again (@DC1611): will the mobile page receive (some of) the page authority of the desktop version this way?

Tnx again.
Marcel

[MattAntonino]

Your gut is right. If you are blocking your "very mobile friendly" pages to Googlebot-mobile you will likely end up with a big mess. If your desktop site is NOT responsive and is indexed for many terms on mobile, I would think you're going to lose those terms.

If you ignore the April 21 update and have a desktop-only site indexed you are definitely going to up for a traffic drop, especially from mobile.

We have clients with 1-3% mobile (industrial services, crane hire, that stuff) and those with 50%+ mobile (a few beauty salons, ecommerce stores, etc.) and I've been telling our clients internally - if you have 3-5% mobile traffic look, it's probably not the end of the world if it takes you until June 1st to make the switch.  If you have 20-30% mobile traffic, get it fixed asap.  And if you're over 30% mobile traffic you absolutely cannot afford not to have a responsive site up by April 21st.  So it's a priority - but how much of one may depend on your business.

[DirkC]

Blocking your mobile pages for indexing is not the best strategy if you have a dedicated mobile site. Better to use canonicals to point to the main domain - full explanation on "how to" here: https://developers.google.com/webmasters/mobile-sites/mobile-seo/configurations/separate-urls

With this setup - Google associates both Mobile & Desktop version - so in terms of page authority this should be equal. I would not ignore the 21st April date- Google is trying to make a point here - so for mobile searches mobile friendliness will be first priority.

rgds,

Dirk