mobilefriendlyupdateIf you’re an online store owner, you’ve hopefully heeded the advice of pretty much everyone and ensured your store is responsive, because as of May 12th, Google’s new mobile-friendly algorithm is now in full effect.

The highly anticipated update is part of Google’s ongoing effort to make the web more mobile-friendly. First announced in March, the new algorithm “increases the effect of the [mobile-friendly] ranking signal” to help users more easily find high-quality, mobile-friendly pages.

Webmasters boasting mobile-friendly sites are anxious to see what type of impact the update the update will bring, which is being described as an additional ranking boost for mobile-friendly sites. When asked in their Google+ hangout Q&A if traffic would improve with the update, Google replied “It’s possible that you’ll see an increase in traffic on mobile. It depends on what other sites on the web are doing and what users are searching for. If users are searching on mobile and other results for that query aren’t mobile-friendly, maybe you’ll see more visits as a result of having better rankings than non-mobile-friendly sites.”

Google reports this update will only affect:

  • Search rankings on mobile devices
  • Search results in all languages globally
  • Individual pages – not entire websites

The new algorithm is a page-by-page signal, which explains why the update was slowly rolled out. Depending on how quickly Google crawls and indexes your pages, you may have already seen tangible results of this update as of last week. If your website is already mobile-friendly, fret not – Google has already stated mobile-friendly websites will not be negatively impacted by this update.

If you’re hoping to boost sales to your online store and maintain a competitive edge, ensure that your store is mobile-friendly. Google recommends that you test your pages using the Mobile-Friendly Test.

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