Google Mobilegeddon - Mobile First Indexing - Businesses Were Given Fair Warning

Did Google Give Fair Warning?

Did Google give fair warning that a major issue for small businesses would be having a Mobile Friendly website which was compliant with their algorithm?  Let’s start off and say YES, whether it was intentional or not. We were all warned by and actually panicked over the April 21, 2015 announcement that Google was splitting its Search Index, prioritizing Mobile over Desktop.

In April 2015 during a trying economy, it was not an easy sell for us to say to small business, “we know we just updated everything a year ago, however, now we need to do an overhaul of your website to be compliant with the new Google changes”.  As you would image, some clients chose to wait it out and see what happened based on budget restraints.  Since the launch of Mobilegeddon a year and a half ago, those who choose to wait did eventually come on board, not only to be Google Mobile Friendly but because they saw the value of having a website that frankly looked nice on a smartphone.

It seemed the importance of having a Mobile Friendly website increased gradually since the launch of Mobilegeddon.  In the early months, we saw changes, but nothing drastic or earth shattering with regard to searches.  After a year, it seemed having a mobile friendly site was more attractive on devices, but nothing truly consistent was seen in the way of search results. Rolling into the summer of 2016,   compliance requirements by Google became much stronger.

And now we are speaking of an entire split of Google’s Search Index creating one database for mobile and one for desktop. It is more than a full 2 years since the announcement of Mobilegeddon, which did not crush non-mobile friendly websites as we know it, but it absolutely gave Small Business and SEOs a fair amount of time to in the position themselves for this latest Google change.