Google’s Mobile-Friendly Algorithm May Be Bigger Than Panda Or Penguin

We’ve been writing a lot about Google’s upcoming mobile-friendly ranking algorithm and its potential impact on websites. But just how big will it be? According to Zineb Ait Bahajji from Google’s Webmaster Trends team, it will have even more of an impact on Google’s search results than the Google Panda update and the Google Penguin update did.

Why will it have such a dramatic impact?

Google’s Panda algorithm impacted approximately 12 percent of search queries at its biggest point, and Penguin impacted a maximum of approximately four percent. Although Bahajji did not specifically state a percentage of queries that will be impacted by the upcoming mobile-friendly ranking algorithm, it is estimated that approximately 50 percent of all queries on Google are now conducted on mobile search. Therefore, if the new algorithm will impact a significant percentage of these mobile searches, the overall result will be massive.

There is no way to know exactly how significant the impact will be until the algorithm launches on April 21. However, based on Bahajji’s comment and the growing prevalence of mobile search, there’s no question that it will be dramatic, and that it’s essential to do everything possible to ensure that your website is mobile-friendly before the launch date.

Google’s stated goal with its new algorithm is to improve the searcher experience. It can certainly be extremely frustrating to try to navigate through a website on your phone that is so tiny that you can’t easily click on the links without pinching, zooming and scrolling to find your way. By ranking websites based on mobile-friendly design, more mobile searchers will end up on sites that are easy to use.

Another announcement from Google is that the company is releasing a new “ranking adjustment” to their doorway page classifier to better handle these pages in the search results. Doorways are sites or pages that are created for the sole purpose of ranking highly for specific search queries. For users, this is problematic as these pages can lead to multiple similar search results, where each one takes the user to more-or-less the same destination. As well, doorway pages can lead users to intermediate pages that are not actually as useful as the final destination, but are simply there to improve ranking. Doorway pages will be penalized in both desktop and mobile search results.

“Over time, we’ve seen sites try to maximize their ‘search footprint’ without adding clear, unique value,” explained Google’s Brian White. “These doorway campaigns manifest themselves as pages on a site, as a number of domains, or a combination thereof. To improve the quality of search results for our users, we’ll soon launch a ranking adjustment to better address these types of pages. Sites with large and well-established doorway campaigns might see a broad impact from this change.”

Overall, a webpage is considered a doorway page if its purpose is not actually an integral part of a website’s user experience, but instead exists to optimize for search engines and funnel visitors into the actual sections of a website that are useful. If it is difficult or impossible to navigate to a page from another part of your website, or if the page duplicates items that already exist elsewhere on the site for the purpose of capturing more search traffic, they will be considered doorway pages and will be penalized by Google in its search results.

Both of Google’s upcoming changes are very important to consider for all websites, and it’s highly advisable to both ensure that your website is mobile-friendly and that you are not using doorway pages to increase your search traffic. Don’t wait until these changes are launched to find out whether or not your website will be penalized. Instead, be sure to make all of the necessary changes now to guarantee that your website will rank high on mobile searches and won’t be penalized in any way.