Where’s the mobile update?
What a fizzer. All that tumult and turmoil for nothing? It would seem that way wouldn’t it. So two months ago, Google told us to be mobile ready because they were making a big change and would be rewarding sites that were mobile friendly. April 21 they said, be ready they said, you could lose a significant amount of traffic they said! Now everyone thinks I’m a knob. Thanks Google. Nothing, nada, zilch, zero is what we have seen from this this update. Nary a change nor tweak have we seen. Many have already declared a win for brands and whitepapers out the wazoo to show the effect of the update. In Australia, we are not seeing any change at all. Nothing. It reminds me of Y2K which is a little awkward as I was on the telly talking about that too.
Not rolled out yet?
Here’s the thing though, I don’t think it has hit .com.au yet. I don’t know about .com but certainly in Australia there has been little to no difference. In last week’s show I was using the search results for the word “broadband” purely as an example. Of course we are monitoring a lot more than that. We are checking all our clients mobile results as well as desktop results and I can tell you there is no statistical significance with the data. Sure there are fluctuations, which is normal but nothing substantial.
Google did say that it would be rolled out to all pages over a week or so and it has only been 6 days. The reason I chose “Broadband” as a phrase is that it is highly competitive and therefore more susceptible to change. We’ve been banging on for years about Google’s 200 plus signals to rank a page and the use of mechanisms like PageRank as a tie breaker for rankings. So if you had a change to the algorithm that was going to reward mobile friendly pages over non mobile friendly ones, a ranking change would surely manifest itself in the more competitive of searches. As we know with any competitive search, little things can mean the difference between no.8 and no.1. Things like page speed, errors or duplication will most certainly impact a search result where there are many pages vying to be no.1. Google wants to show it’s users the best and if the mobile update has been rolled out, they need to sack the team that implemented it because it is next to useless. That’s IF it’s been rolled out.
Where’s the kaboom?
Even Though a lot of the press surrounding this update was overblown, with shrieks of “you’ll disappear from Google ” being the norm, Google for their part downplayed the potential negative effects with a counter argument of mobile nirvana and unicorns and rainbows. Well we got nothing. Crickets. So either Google has all of a sudden become that drunken mate who promises to change the world tomorrow only to wake up with his pillow stuck to his face, muttering something about coffee, or the mobile update has not been rolled out yet. I tend to think the latter is more likely.
Jim’s been here for a while, you know who he is.
