Skip to main content

Some Tips To Survive Google’s Mobile Friendly Update


Google constantly tweaks its search algorithm to provide a better user experience to internet surfers. Most of the time these updates are incremental but sometimes, they can affect millions of users. This is exactly what has happened with the latest search update for mobile users. Known as ‘Mobilegeddon’ by some SEO specialists and marketers, it has changed a lot. Have you been affected or just want to know more about it? Read on.
This update only affected mobile search rankings of those websites that are not mobile friendly. Google also provided webmasters and website owners with a mobile friendly test tool that tells whether or not a website is mobile friendly.

Tips To Survive The Mobilegeddon

The simplest answer to the question “How to survive mobilegeddon?” is “responsiveness”. You need to make your website responsive to make it appear properly on smartphones of different screen sizes. Following tips will surely help you survive the update.
  1. Check how a search engine bot sees your website. You can use several free tools such as Google webmaster tool. To use it just sign up, add your site and navigate to Crawl >> Fetch as Google from left side bar. There. insert url of your webpage, select “Mobile Smartphone” from drop down and run the analysis.
b
If you see green tick mark after running the analysis, your webpage is good to go with Google’s mobile search bots.
  1. Deactivate your non-responsive themes and install responsive ones. A responsive theme can easily be found for any popular CMS platform. Once a responsive theme has been installed, test it through your mobile device or using google’s mobile friendly test tool.
  2. If you don’t want to change your blog’s theme, install plugins that add responsive functionality to websites. Jetpack is a very popular WordPress plugin that adds a mobile version of site that will only be visible to mobile visitors. WPtouch is another great piece of add-on for WordPress sites that does the same work of detecting mobile visitors and serving them with a mobile friendly version of website.
  3. Monitor your website’s mobile metrics. Google Analytics offers a great help by displaying different types of devices that are being used to browse through your website. It displays a handful of useful information like number of visitors coming from a specific device, bounce rate, page per session, time spent per session etc.
12345
This information can be very useful if used correctly. By analyzing the stats one can easily find out whether or not visitors are enjoying the mobile version. If the bounce rate is high and pages and duration per session are low, it is a clear indication that mobile visitors are not satisfied. In which case several remedial actions might need to be taken.
  1. Do not use any content in your blog that is incompatible or un-playable with mobiles or smartphones. Always embed those videos that can be played on mobile devices. Same is the case for animations, images etc.
A fellow Pakistani blogger discusses these tips in greater details in this article.

Why Did Google Update Mobile Search?

Simply because more and more people are using smartphones and tablets now. According to an insight published by ComScore, number of people using mobile phones surpassed the number of people using computers in 2014. Dazeinfo published a study in January 2014 according to which 73% of world’s total internet users (which is 1.9 billion users) were accessing internet primarily through their smartphones at that time. The study also projected the same percentage to increase up to 90% by 2014 (which makes 3 billion people roughly).
These studies suggested that search algorithms for smart phones need to be tailored accordingly.

Who Needs To Worry After This Update?

The answer is simple. Website owners who care about their mobile audience need to worry and take preventive actions. Those who already have a mobile friendly website can sigh with relief. Websites that were only made for desktop users and do not offer anything to mobile users can simply ignore this update as it will de-rank them in mobile search results only which will not hurt their business. Their desktop search rankings will remain intact.
smartphone-user-Wolrdwide-penetration
Unlike previous search algorithm updates that turned thousands of online business upside down this update has not caused much havoc. One reason is that it only affected mobile traffic of websites. The other reason is that preventive measures for this one are easy and take less time to implement.
It has been more than two weeks since the update was launched but not many reports of sudden traffic loss or gain have been received. The Google bot for mobile search is still doing its work indexing all the websites again for mobile search results. It is better for all website owners to do the needful before they are affected.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Develop your own game by learning these free courses

We recently recommended courses you should learn before you will launch your first startup in order to avoid some common mistakes. In Quick Tips today, we’ll recommend you some free courses that will help you make your first game and begin your career as a developer. Before we highlight the details of the courses you ought to take, here are some introductory courses which will prepare you to learn these courses more effectively; Java Programming Basics  – Prepare yourself for programming on Android and the Web Introduction to JavaScript  – Create animations and understand variables and strings. When you have gone through those courses above then proceed to ones given below to develop your first game: 1. Create a 2048 game in just 1 day For those who have zero experience in programming and don’t want to take the above courses, then enroll in this course from Udacity. You will learn the basics of HTML and CSS as well as their interaction with JavaScript. ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Huawei Mate 10 Pro: A Premium Flagship With Some Odd Omissions

When Huawei had launched, they were known as a brand that mostly dealt with budget smartphones and even their flagships were not up to the standards that people expected at that time. However, times have now changed and leading the innovation front nowadays is Huawei. A few of their flagships in the recent year or so have been nothing short of impressive but this year’s Mate 10 line up has changed the brand image forever and consumers now know that Huawei is a serious market player and should not be taken lightly. We’ve already reviewed the  Mate 10 Lite and there was a lot to like about that phone. Today we have with us the most expensive one of the bunch, the Mate 10 Pro. For a more in-depth review and understanding of various Mate 10 Pro features, do watch the video review linked below. Design Like most of the flagships in the industry, Huawei also makes use of some premium material on the Mate 10 Pro. You have curved Gorilla Glass on the front and back and where th...
Post a Comment
Read more

The upgraded Google News app is now available on iOS and Android

One of the more intriguing announcements at Google IO 2018 was of  a new Google News app  to take the place of the Google Play NewsStand, which was initially launched in 2013.  After describing the new Google News app  in a dedicated page for the app on its website, Google has now officially released the app on the  App Store  and  Google Play . Google Play NewsStand was used as a resource to get news around the world. The news would be of every category, even the news which doesn’t interest the user. Whereas with this new Google news app, the artificial intelligence of Google shows you the news you want to see, which you usually search for on Google. According to Google , the Google News app now  “uses a new set of AI techniques to take a constant flow of information as it hits the web, analyze it in real time and organize it into storylines.”  Artificial intelligence(AI) gives the app an ability to process and sort the news from...
Post a Comment
Read more