Google, which dominates online search had announce the decision to make its search rankings more mobile friendly from today has now updated its algorithm to favour sites that are “mobile-friendly.” This means that people who use Google to search on their smartphone may not find many of their favorite sites at the top of the rankings from today. Considering that smartphone and tablet web surfing are recording unprecedented growth, the Google’s move is more than justified because no one wants to see a 1200 px and 800 px webpage by pinching and zooming on their smartphone screens. Google afterall, wants sites to load quickly and be easy to navigate on a mobile phone. This will affect websites which have not updated their websites to “mobile friendly” version as they wont appear on SERPs and it will also take a toll on their Google Page Rank when its announced. According to comScore Media Metrix, Google handles 65% market share of U.S. Internet searches and this move is about to affect small and medium business websites the most. Google is doing this because it wants consumers to “find content that’s not only relevant and timely, but also easy to read and interact with on smaller mobile screens,” Google said in a statement. Google’s last big algorithm update, code-named Panda, impacted “11% of all search results,” says Danny Sullivan, the editor of the SearchEngineLand website. “It was a big shake-up, and this one could be even more dramatic.” You can head over to the Mobile Friendly testing page to check whether your website passes out Google’s latest diktat. If your website fails the above test, kindly do the following immediately • Call your local website host. Many have tools in place to transition your website. GoDaddy, the top provider of website addresses and hosting, offers a tool to completely rebuild your website to make it mobile-friendly and charges $1 monthly for the service. Competitor Bluehost has a tool that’s less time-consuming and potentially cheaper. For a one-time fee of $25, it’s goMobi tool builds a smaller, mobile version of your site. • Go to a service like dudamobile for a more robust, yet smaller version of your website, starting at $5 monthly. Kindly remember to avoid forked URLs if your business has a separate mobile and desktop website. This may further complicate things.
