Google Confirms That Ranking Criteria Around Mobile Comes Largely From Desktop Content

During the mobilegeddon panel at the recent SMX Advanced, Google’s Gary Illyes confirmed that Google looks at the desktop version of a Web page for many of the factors and ranking criteria around mobile. In other words, if your dealership has a desktop version of a webpage and a mobile version that contains different content, Google will rank the mobile version as if it had the desktop version’s content. You could therefore potentially have completely different content on mobile.

Cloaking is a concept in SEO where you show the search engine a piece of content that is not actually what the user sees. Illyes explained that the company set up a team to investigate whether or not this type of practice was occurring, but was surprised after a year of research to find that it wasn’t. Regardless, he said that this doesn’t imply that Google wouldn’t be able to take action on any webmasters who go that route, yet the company has not yet needed to apply any penalties for this type of behavior to date.

Illyes said that Google has been experimenting with building a separate mobile index, but hasn’t made the decision about whether it will ever move to that model. Currently, the vast majority of signals that your mobile site is seeing in the mobile search results are from the desktop, including content, page speed, links, and other factors, with the exception of the mobile user experience.

The next thing that will most likely be added to the mobile-only factors will be interstitial ads as a negative factor and looking at the speed of a mobile site versus a desktop site. Although Google currently looks at the desktop version for many of the factors and ranking criteria around mobile, this doesn’t remove the need to have a powerful mobile-friendly website, as the mobile user experience is still a factor in ranking.

It’ll be interesting to see whether Google’s current experiments come to fruition or if the company will choose a different route in the long term.