Google Sending Mass Notifications To Websites That Are Not Mobile Friendly

Google has recently been sending a massive number of notifications to webmasters with sites that are not mobile friendly. The notifications are being sent via Google Webmaster Tools and via email as a reminder that sites that are not considered mobile friendly by Google Search will be displayed and ranked accordingly for smartphone users.

Clearly, there is a great importance in making all websites mobile friendly to ensure that they rank well for the growing number of smartphone users. Many industry insiders suspect that Google’s mass notifications are a sign that a big algorithm change is coming soon, although the company has not made an announcement to this effect.

Although these mass notifications are new, creating mobile friendly websites has been an important consideration for some time already. Last November, Google wrote the following in a blog post. “Have you ever tapped on a Google Search result on your mobile phone, only to find yourself looking at a page where the text was too small, the links were tiny, and you had to scroll sideways to see all the content? This usually happens when the website has not been optimized to be viewed on a mobile phone.” Google continued by explaining that it had started to experiment with adding a “mobile friendly” label to its mobile search results to help to avoid the frustration of smartphone users ending up on websites that have not been optimized to be viewed on a mobile phone.

Now, with its sending of mass notifications, there’s a great likelihood that an algorithm change is on its way. Although Google did introduce a broken mobile site penalty in 2013, the company is now sending notifications to even sites that are knowingly not mobile friendly, which indicates that a bigger change may be coming soon.

If you run a website that has issues with being mobile friendly, or if you have a website that has never been optimized for mobile usage, it’s important to make this change now before suffering poor ranking in Google’s search results. With mobile usage on the rise and with no sign of it slowing down, there is no better time than now to concentrate on this essential aspect of a company’s web presence.

The following is a copy of the message that was sent to webmasters: