In an announcement posted to Webmaster blog, Google has informed users they will be improving the effects of their mobile-friendly algorithm, initially launched back on April 21, 2015.
In their statement, Google details that the update will be beginning in May and that it will increase the effect of their mobile-friendly ranking signal. If you are already mobile friendly, however, Google confirmed that you will not likely be impacted by the update.
When the update does come into effect, it won’t appear abrupt. The rollout will happen gradually, so non-mobile-friendly websites won’t drop off completely when the algorithm is pushed out. It appears the update will be similar in fashion to the slow rollout of Panda 4.2. It’s unclear, though, whether the full rollout will take just weeks or possibly months to fully implement. Google’s only indication of a timeline is that you can expect to see updates starting at the beginning of May.
One theory as to why this may be a gradual rollout is that the algorithm is a page-by-page signal. In this case, it may take some time for Google to properly asses each individual page. Depending on the speed at which Google accomplishes this and indexes all the pages on your website, it may take some time before it shows up.
Compared to the original mobile-friendly update, it’s believed that this rollout will have a significantly reduced impact. The former update, dubbed “Mobilgeddon” by web-developers and webmaster, which rolled out almost one year ago, was aimed to increase the ranking of mobile-friendly sites over traditional, non-mobile friendly sites. The rollout which took about a week to complete was expected by many to change the landscape of Google searches. Once the rollout was complete, however, not everyone experienced much of an impact and was certainly not the drastic shift most people were expecting.
In this more modest mobile-friendly algorithm update, no change will likely be seen if you already have a mobile-friendly site. If you are not already currently mobile-friendly however, or want to make sure that you are, you can check out Google’s mobile guidelines or Google’s mobile-friendly tool.
