Have your clients experienced any major shift in traffic ??
OR is this more like Y2K ???
LOTTA headlines on this but no concrete answers yet. Smells like Y2k to me.
well, in the mobile serps which impact my clients I would say 95% of the first 50 or sites in each one are marked mobile friendly.
So when it rolls out here (no evidence yet) I would expect not much change.... although I have tried to not ask if this is really a big deal too loudly in public as everone is warning how massive it is...
But today we have emails coming out of our kazoos from clients wanting to know how they've been impacted. Which at least makes for a nice easy answer right now. Would be good to hear if anyone who has definately been updated is seeing much change.
Too early to say, but little to no difference here so far.
Nothing in our neck of the woods. Zip. Nada.
Small site and small data set, mobile sessions actually doubled (1000 to 2000) for April 19 and 20, and then came back down to long-term normal (1000) for April 21.
Google has said it will take a while to roll out. I'm guessing that with everyone scrambling to fix, they will apply the filter only after the first crawl that takes place after April 21. That said, Google crawls an average of 400 pages per day on that site which is pretty much the entirety of it, so if it's going to happen, it should happen soon.
we do have a client who has had to delay launch of their mobile site as their devs have hit a snag, so we should be able to get quite an accurate picture of what happens to not mobile friendly, then what happens when you make responsive.
For them, visits yesterday were down by about 8% on an average Tuesday, which appears to be all driven by a 20% drop in mobile traffic. Which sounds meaningful, but the figures were down by almost exactly the same amount on Monday.
I do wonder how much of their mobile traffic is brand, and how vigilant Google will be about demoting the brand site for obvious brand queries (like location searches) - this site is both retail brand and factory visit site - so it could make a big difference to figures. I think once we have a weeks data I'll try and do some analysis of location/device/landing page, but so far I'm still not sure we're seeing an impact, let alone able to look at what it is!
With a few small exceptions, my client's sites and my own were already mobile friendly. We're not detecting any SERP changes yet.
>> Smells like Y2k
Y2K's lesson: People who solve problems before they happen seldom get the credit they deserve.
Tin foil hat time:
April 21st was a smokescreen. The update happened some time ago, which is why nobody is seeing anything other than normal flux.
Its been out in some parts of the world for some time (some weeks at least, probably longer), and still not out in others.
Half baked theory based on the data I have available.
http://www.advancedwebranking.com/blog/google-mobile-update-study/
We checked mobile organic traffic across 10 fairly significant domains yesterday. 4 were mobile friendly, 6 not. We didn't factor for branded search, which is meant to dodge the update, but really no discernable change yet.
Didn't they originally say it would take about a week to roll out though?
I'm still not seeing anything I would call significant - posssibly (perhaps, who knows) a 15% drop on that one specifically non mobile friendly site I work on, but considering all their big competitors are very solidly mobile friendly you would expect a bigger impact iff it had rolled out fully. Perhaps datacentres are mid change still -
http://searchengineland.com/google-confirms-mobile-friendly-algorithm-roll-out-completely-live-in-some-data-centers-219696
Movement on 23rd in some of the data I watch. Almost nothing beforehand (from the "official" 21st launch at least)
Seen and Heard: I talked to the editor of our local little 135 year old daily newspaper. He said he used to rank with the big papers on searches with his keywords on Google. Now his rankings and traffic have tanked and he suspects it is because his newspaper site is not mobile friendly.
PS.
He still publishes it with MS Frontpage.
>suspects it is because his newspaper site is not mobile friendly
I kind of doubt that. Not being mobile friendly should not affect desktop searches/rankings imo.
I might be wrong tho.
I just looked at a small site with a terrible mobile experience that was flagged by Google as mobile unfriendly.
April 1 - July 31 this year is up 50% in mobile sessions coming from organic search while overall it is up only 28% (most of which is due to mobile)
On the other hand, mobile sessions coming from direct and referral are up closer to 90%, while overall they are much lower.
So it's not like the site got banned, but mobile organic is up much less mobile from other sources.
>> different
Google specifically said in April that desktop SERPs wouldn't be impacted by the mobile friendly update, which did surprise me at the time as I had thought the desktop/mpbile algos were converging pre the update.
>> frontpage
aside from all those alerts about .css and .JS (although doubt frontpage uses .css?) I have been seeing more and more older sites working less well in new browsers. It wouldn't surprise me if G is downgrading sites which don't work well in Chrome, or downgrading sites which don't work on specific broowsers to people searching using that browser - the first seems more likely but less defensible... either way that would be my guess for some of the variations that people are seeing which don't seem to fit with location/device friendliness/adwords spend theories.