'Mobile-First Indexing ' Google’s Begins Making a big change to Organic Ranking and Appearance

As we know, Since 1997 Google has used the desktop version of websites to determine it’s search relevance and organic ranking signals in order to populate its organic search index.

Google has begun testing mobile-first indexing, using mobile content to determine it’s search relevance and organic ranking signals, which will primarily look at the mobile version of your website for its ranking signals and eventually fall back on the desktop version when there is no mobile version available for user search query.

Most of Google Searches are Mobile

Google realized that most people search on Google using mobile devices, and the company has begun experimentation with switching to a mobile-first indexing methodology last year. This will be of particular interest to webmasters, depending upon the configuration of the websites under their management.

A detailed study released by Google reveals roughly 40% of people search only on a smartphone. More people are searching Google via smartphone than ever before the company says, with the most popular categories revolving around health, parenting, and beauty.

Other top findings from Google’s study include:

• 80% of people use a smartphone
• 67% of people use a desktop computer
• 16% of people use a tablet
• 57% of people use more than one type of device
• 27% of people use a smartphone only
• 14% of people use a desktop computer only

Dissecting these findings, it’s interesting to learn that of the people who only use one type of device, twice as many are using smartphones than desktop computers.

Google acknowledged the significance of the undertaking and wrote on the Webmaster Central Blog:

Today, most people are searching on Google using a mobile device. However, our ranking systems still typically look at the desktop version of a page’s content to evaluate its relevance to the user. This can cause issues when the mobile page has less content than the desktop page because our algorithms are not evaluating the actual page that is seen by a mobile searcher.

Although mobile-friendly sites should not require any changes, Google has made several suggestions for sites that maintain separate markup for mobile and desktop devices. Otherwise, sites optimized only for desktop consumption will continue to be indexed as they are now.

Google wrote:

We understand this is an important shift in our indexing and it’s one we take seriously. We’ll continue to carefully experiment over the coming months on a small scale and we’ll ramp up this change when we’re confident that we have a great user experience.

For websites that do not currently offer a mobile-optimized experience, the news may inspire website owner and webmasters to quickly build and deploy a mobile version of their site. However, Google recommended a more careful approach and advised, as

If you are building a mobile version of your site, keep in mind that a functional desktop-oriented site can be better than a broken or incomplete mobile version of the site. It's better for you to build up your mobile site and launch it when ready.

No mobile site? Where to Start?

So you know that, Google prioritizing mobile over desktop sends a message that Website owners, webmasters and SEOs should do the same. At the very least, this means having either a mobile or responsive version of your website.

Having a mobile-optimized website is not enough for eligible top position on google organic search. In short, mobile-friendly is the bare minimum requirement, You should take care of following issue:

• Follow Google Webmaster Guidelines.
• Site Optimize for right keywords.
• Website Speed Matters.
• Have a healthy amount of google accessible text on your site.
• Site images have descriptive ALT tags and filenames.
• Make sure your site isn’t creating any duplicate content.
• Have a XML Sitemap.
• Backlinks from Authority Website.
• Social Media Presence.

The best way to optimize your site for speed is to publish content using Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) technology. If you’re not yet on board with AMP, I would recommend regularly checking on your mobile PageSpeed using Google’s PageSpeed Insights and Mobile-Friendly Test.

Keep load times as low as possible. Ideally, website owners, webmasters and SEOs should have these bases covered before Google splits its search index. No exact time frame was given as to when the split will happen, but in this industry, it never hurts to be proactive.

We will keep you posted

As we see changes to the Google search results and index, we will report back to you with any issues. When this mobile-first index fully rolls out, we will let you all know.

Google’s Update From Last Week

There has been a lot of chalk talk about last week’s mysterious Google update, but up until now we haven’t been able to bring forth anything more than the obvious: major shifts were cropping up in rankings. We decided to roll up our sleeves and get any insight we could from the data we have; after a good amount of data-slicing, we’re back with some answers.

Definitely a Google Update

Just like Mozcast and Algoroo, our Google Algorithm Changes tool reported extremely unusual ranking changes around the date of June 19, 2015.

More precisely, 35% of all 583,140 URLs tracked changed their ranking by more than 10 positions. There’s no doubt that this is huge. “Colossal”, as Dr Pete so eloquently put it.

Changes were major in all three countries we’re tracking:

Nevertheless, there is a lot of uncertainty regarding the cause of all that shifting. A couple of very good theories were expressed over the past week. Dr Pete dove into their data and found that there is a strong connection between the update and HTTPS. He was also first to form the hypothesis that it may all be a consequence of the giant Wikipedia’s migration to HTTPS.

But according to Google representatives, the update was neither Panda, Penguin or HTTPS. They said that this was just one of their continuous tweaks to the core algorithm. No indications on what was changed in particular.

More insights came from Searchmetrics’ quick analysis of their data, which pointed out that “this update seems to be primarily concerned with trending keywords as well as temporary search intentions related to informational (shorthead) keywords.” According to their data, media websites were most favored by the update.

The research we carried out is based on the data we’re tracking with the Google Algorithm Changes tool, and relies on SERP data for approximately 10k keywords and 580k URLs, across various industries.

Here’s what we found:

Wikipedia only accounts for 0.34% of changed URLs

On June the 17th, 92.54% of all the URLs we’re tracking changed their rankings. One third of all these URLs got shifted by more than 10 positions.

Although Wikipedia is at the top of the list of domains who changed their rankings, their URLs account for only 0.34% of changes in our data set. That means that at least for this set of data, the giant website is not responsible for the entire movement in SERPs. While it may have caused other URLs to shift as well, it would be nevertheless very unlikely that 0.34% of changes have shaken the entire SERPs by themselves.

As Wikipedia continues its transition to HTTPS, we’re keeping an eye on the SERPs hoping to observe any changes that may result from this development. For the moment, the past few post-update days were extremely quiet in all three countries we’re tracking.

Nothing unusual among the most affected domains

By looking at the list of most affected domains for this update we were not able to spot any unusual patterns, or to find additional clues to support Searchmetrics’ hypothesis. While Wikipedia leads the changes list in our data set, sites like Amazon.com or Yelp.com have amassed more than three times the amount of changes felt by news publications such as nytimes.com or huffingtonpost.com.

Most HTTPS URLs have changed their position

Here comes the most interesting part. Most of the HTTPS URLs we’re tracking have changed their position in search; not only that, but 68.13% of these shifted with more than 10 positions!

Tweet this: 2 out of 3 HTTPS URLs changed their rankings with at least 10 positions

For comparison, here is the ranking behavior we saw for the non-secure HTTP URLs:

With that many changes and hundreds of HTTPS URLs dropping out of top 50 results, the hypothesis of a Google update focused on HTTPS becomes extremely plausible, regardless of Google’s contradicting statements.

We’ll keep you posted as soon as we have something new to share on this.