The mobile-friendly apocalypse came and went, and similarly to having watched a b-rated holywood disaster film, we were all left feeling largely underwhelmed.
So much activity, so much hype... and yet so little change. So what's going on?
Experts in the world of Search Engine Optimisation (
SEO) are sharing and swapping their data trying to understand what, if anything, has changed as a result of the
mobile friendly algorithm rolled out on the 21st April this year.
One of the industry's leading experts and bloggers, Barry Schwartz, asked Google to confirm that the algorithm has finished rolling out and that the changes have been made, and Google responded that it had, but that the changes were still being processed. You can read that
here. In this article, he forecasts that we have "seen the worst of it", but others, including me, are not so sure.
Given that Google warned us all of "significant change" to the search listings for sites that they consider to be non-mobile-friendly, and knowing that such changes can have a drastic affect on small businesses world-wide, it is feasible that the changes will happen slowly, giving everyone enough time to deal with any issues, and saving Google from a horde of complaints.
The approach would appear to be more like that being taken by Bing, who announced on the 14th May both their aims and definitions of mobile friendly websites (
here), and how they will modify their search results to promote those sites that work well on all devices, whilst not penalising genuinley relevant and useful, but not optimised, content.
These mobile freindly algorithms are no doubt the first leg of a journey that the Search Engine companies will be
encouraging us all to go on, and we will see a tightening of the rules and harsher penalties as time goes by.
