While mobile has been growing in importance for search rankings, two announcements from Google over the past few weeks have made mobile achieve complete dominance in the search market.
Firstly, Google announced that they would be serving different results to Mobile and Desktop users, with results being targeted for those formats, so sites without mobile compatibility being downgraded in the rankings on mobile. Meaning no matter how good your site used to rank, without a responsive website or a completely separate mobile website it will get downgraded on mobile devices.
Secondly in the last few days, Google announced.
Although our search index will continue to be a single index of websites and apps, our algorithms will eventually primarily use the mobile version of a site’s content to rank pages from that site, to understand structured data, and to show snippets from those pages in our results. Of course, while our index will be built from mobile documents, we’re going to continue to build a great search experience for all users, whether they come from mobile or desktop devices.
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.
Meaning that even on desktop, sites which perform badly on Mobile results will be downgraded in search. This in addition to the penalties that Google already heaped on non mobile compliant websites which lowered their search rankings.
These announcements now put the importance of the mobile version of your site at an absolutely premium, making it far more important than the desktop version of your site. If you don’t get mobile right, quite simply, you’re not getting your web presence right.