Mobilegeddon - What actually happened?

SEO folk like us here at WPN Chameleon were, not surprisingly, alarmed at the effect this would have on sites that didn’t do well on mobile-friendliness. Evidence so far has been based on some pretty small data samples, so the hype may have been overdone. A US search outfit has just released data, culled from 15,000 plus search results, which gives much more valid evidence on the change. They found 46.6% of the pages that weren’t mobile friendly did, as expected, lose ranking. But then the story gets interesting. For every 2.4 non-mobile friendly pages that lost ranking, 1 actually gained. And 25.4% of all the mobile-friendly pages also lost ranking. It looks as though mobile unfriendliness wasn’t the main cause of loss of ranking, because only 42.5% were replaced with mobile-friendly pages.Curiously, the other 57.2% were replaced with pages just as mobile unfriendly.

Did mobile friendly pages increase massively? It doesn’t look like that. There was only a 1.3% increase in mobile friendly pages as a result of the update. Want to know more? Go to www.stonetemple.com to see the numbers. And if you need some help to get your site mobile friendly, email Dan Martin, our Digital Strategy Director.