Google is going to devalue non-mobile friendly sites and it’s happening a little more quickly than I expected. In early February (as discussed in my earlier blog post) Google sent warnings about this change to webmasters whose sites were not mobile friendly. They’ve been talking about mobile friendliness for a while now and I knew when I saw Google sending warnings that it would mean offending sites would be devalued soon. In a Webmaster Central Blog post on February 26th, Google said they would do exactly that.
As you can see in the excerpt above, Google is about to smash the ranking of a lot of websites. The speed with which they are making this move is a real problem because it is nearly impossible to get a high-quality site redesign and recode done so quickly – it can take three to six months to complete, even for a small site and it can take even longer than that for larger sites. Google’s move will definitely push people to get their sites revamped, but their unreasonable timeline will really hurt those businesses while they comply.
Bottom line: if your site isn’t mobile friendly, you’d better get it in shape fast. You have until April 21st before your mobile traffic disappears.
