What Google’s Mobile Update Means For Your Website Or Business

Google is all set to release a mobile-friendly search algorithm in 2017 to accommodate content visibility on smartphones as a ranking parameter. As such, the sites which show pop-ups or other intrusive interstitials will find their performances for mobile searches drop significantly. This update is the second prong of Google’s “Mobilegeddon” update for mobile SEO and is set to be released in January. The “mobile-friendly, part two” update will ensure that the users get access to the least intrusive, most relevant content first, rather than intrusive or irrelevant interstitials.

What Suffers as a Result of this Update?

The definitions for interstitials are still fuzzy, but Google’s Webmaster Central Blog outlines a few criteria for consideration. A popup which covers or obscures the main content on loading the page or after a stipulated time or length scrolled is an interstitial. Any intrusive online marketing ad, spam or other banners which a user has to interact with or dismiss before getting access to the content itself will be filtered out too. Sites with layouts which seem to accommodate interstitials in the above-the-fold portion will get lower rankings as well.

It is worth noting that Google solely decides what is intrusive and what is not, so the designers and owners of websites and their own design principles do not come into play here. The Webmaster Central Blog has also released some examples of acceptable interstitials which will not cause drops in rankings. These are as follows:

• Legally mandated notifications, like age consent or cookie usage notifications.
• For sites which do not have publicly indexable content, interactive login dialogs.
• Banners which do not take up a lot of screen space and can be dismissed without any hassle.

What Does this Mean for SEO?

The update impacts a small subset of performance in natural searches only. That really implies organic search performance generally would not be affected. Suppose most of your search traffic naturally comes to you from desktop users, there is a possibility that you would treat this update as irrelevant and unimportant as far as your business is concerned.

Always keep in mind that poor performance today may not necessarily imply that there is no scope for improvement or that there is hardly any potential. It actually implies that you are not adequately equipped to grab the attention of the mobile shoppers. You need to compete effectively especially for the numerous mobile shoppers who are looking for your products through the search engines.  The update would not be impacting sites which are avoiding intrusive interstitials for certain things such as ad installations, email collection, display advertising or promotions.

Google could re-rank your site every time it scans your site as per the mobile-friendly modifications you have adopted. Google has come up with an effective tool for assisting owners in testing the mobile friendliness of their sites. The Mobile-Friendly Tool would be taking only a minute for crawling through a web page and analyzing it. It would either give a green signal to you saying all is fine or you would get a list of things where you have gone wrong and violated the mobile guidelines provided by Google.

Conclusion

Google has always valued the cross-platform experience, and realizes the importance of mobile search, considering more than 50% of their searches come from smartphones. Google’s fundamental monetization scheme will always be advertising and information. Hence, if it provides irrelevant or obscure results, it runs the risk of users switching to other sources and abandoning their search engine, which means they lose a huge user base and also a lot of money.

Part one ushered in a phase called Mobilegeddon in the searching community, leading to a major overhaul in coding, design, and overall SEO strategies. It would, however, be incorrect to think that part two will have such drastic effects. This is because it adds only one more ranking factor to the already extensive list of the same. Once understood and studied, it should be easy enough to integrate into your SEO strategies. No matter how important it is, no new introduction or single factor will play a huge role in deciding rankings for a particular query. Your ranking will always be the culmination of all the tactics and strategies you’ve put in, combined with the quality of your content.