Major Two Changes In Google Ranking Procedure. Don't Let It Bury Your Site!
Hello folks! I thought I'd let you know about the huge changes Google has beginning January 10, 2017.
This past year is the first year that mobile website searches surpassed desktop searches. In fact, 60% of Google searches were performed from a mobile device. So, Google is changing their ranking criteria 2017. In fact, if your site is not mobile friendly, it could bury you! Here's what Google had to say about that: To improve the mobile search experience, after January 10, 2017, pages where content is not easily accessible to a user on the transition from the mobile search results may not rank as highly.
Change #1; Google Is Penalizing Sites With Pop-Ups
One of the things we must address are our pop-ups to collect email addresses. Of course, we don't want to do away with these, because, email marketing is a huge factor in our conversions and one of the things we actually have control of in your internet business. But, Google IS going to penalize our sites that have these "intrusive" pop-ups because it gives a mobile user a bad experience. It blocks the underlying content that they are trying to reach. This is also from Google's SEO announcement; “Although the majority of pages now have text and content on the page that is readable without zooming, we’ve recently seen many examples where these pages show intrusive interstitials to users. While the underlying content is present on the page and available to be indexed by Google, content may be visually obscured by an interstitial. This can frustrate users because they are unable to easily access the content that they were expecting when they tapped on the search result."
Alternatives
Don't panic. There are alternative measures. On some of the list buidling tools, depending on who you are using, you can turn off the mobile tools and leave the desktop tools on. Of course, this is just for you to do temporary until you fix your pop-ups for mobile viewing. In the meantime, you can set your email campaign to use click triggers or inline. Click triggers are pop-ups that only appear when a button or link is clicked on rather than automatic. This way, the viewer does it willingly. This is totally acceptable with Google. The same idea with "inline" approach. It is embedded in your actual content and looks like it was meant to be there and not intrusive as a pop-up.
I hope to post some blogs showing how each one of these are implemented in the near future. You can also go to SumoMe to learn how.
Change #2; Google Is Ranking Pages By Mobile First; Desktop Second
To find out if your website is mobile friendly, which should be top priority right now so as not to lose rankings, Google has a free tool that will tell you how your site ranks in mobile friendliness and mobile speed. Here are those links.
Google Mobile Test
I hope this blog has helped you in preparing for 2017 and get in a better position for great things ahead!
Happy Blogging!
Grant
Recent Comments
18
Thanks for being so generous in sharing this. I'm surprised I haven't seen more about it. All the best to you.
Thank you fro sharing this and got to check my sites of mobile friendliness and got a satisfaction results.
Thats good. I imagine everyones sites here will be mobile friendly bc Kyle and Carson have developed them that way. The mobile speed will be more on us to fix, which can get a little complex. At least for me, lol.
Thanks for the info., Grant:). I just did the mobile test, and it said that the page they ran is mobile friendly:). At least I've done one thing right!
Nice blog post, I was just reading about the Google changes last weekend, to be honest, I think it's great, and I will almost say that one thing I hate on websites, is the popups, they generally make me close the page immediately regardless of how good the site content is.
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Thanks for the heads up and holiday homework. Will review and action