Do Google's mobile friendly updates effect visibility on desktop results pages?

[KerryK]

Google say that their quest to make websites more mobile friendly impacts mobile search results - https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2016/03/continuing-to-make-web-more-mobile.html

But I am wondering if having a website that is less mobile friendly effects desktop SERPs as well? We require Adobe Flash as a tool for people to upload their images to us but not on the landing pages we're trying to rank. So our landing pages are not as mobile friendly as they could be (which we're looking to improve) but am worried this is effecting desktop search results even though Google do not claim they do.

[KerryK]

Thanks for the response.

But presumably when Moz show me search visibility scores this takes into account mobile as well? So maybe our landing page not being particularly optimised for mobile is one factor why our visibility has fallen?

[ThompsonPaul]

The short response is - No - mobile-friendly and mobile ranking signals have no effect on desktop search performance, Kerry. And this only makes sense - there are many reasons why a desktop version might have functionality that would be useless/unneeded on mobile version.

In fact the opposite in one specific case - the speed ranking factors for both mobile and desktop are based exclusively on the desktop rendering of the site at the moment. There is talk of Google moving to an actual mobile-speed ranking signal in the near future, but at the moment, it's only desktop speed that factors in, even for mobile.

Hope that answers your question?

P.