FAQ: Mobile-Friendly Update and Your Medical Practice

So it’s offically been a week since Google launched its Mobile-Friendly update (“Mobilegeddon”), and there’s been no shortage of great questions floating around the Internet from website owners like yourself. Inspired by a recent FAQ article from Google, this video will explore some of the most frequently asked questions in regard to this mobile update, specifically the questions that affect your medical practice’s website.

1. When will Google launch this algorithm update? (0:00)

2. What is it and who will this update impact? (0:42)

3. If my site isn’t mobile-friendly, will it negatively impact my desktop or tablet rankings? (1:18)

From Google:

“No, this update has no effect on searches from tablets or desktops. It affects searches from mobile devices across all languages and locations.”

4. How do I even know if my site is mobile-friendly or not? (1:55)

5. Does Google favor a responsive site over a mobile separate website (m.example.com)? (3:10)

From Google:

“No, mobile-friendliness is assessed the same, whether you use responsive web design (RWD), separate mobile URLs, or dynamic serving for your configuration. If your site uses separate mobile URLs or dynamic serving, we recommend reviewing the Mobile SEO guide to make sure Google is properly crawling and indexing your mobile pages.”

6. Didn’t Google release a mobile update in 2013? (5:23)

7. It’s been a few days since the update and I haven’t seen any changes. Does this mean that my sight is in the clear? (6:05)

From Google:

“You won’t be able to definitively determine whether your site’s rankings are impacted by the mobile-friendly update by April 22nd. While we begin rolling out the mobile-friendly update on April 21st, it’ll be a week or so before it makes its way to all pages in the index.”

8. Is the update site-wide or on a page-by-page basis? (6:46)

From Google:

“It’s a page-level change. For instance, if ten of your site’s pages are mobile-friendly, but the rest of your pages aren’t, only the ten mobile-friendly pages can be positively impacted.”

9. What is my site is mobile friendly but I link to another site that isn’t mobile-friendly? (7:22)

From Google:

“Your page can still be “mobile-friendly” even if it links to a page that’s not mobile-friendly, such as a page designed for larger screens, like desktops. It’s not the best experience for mobile visitors to go from a mobile-friendly page to a desktop-only page, but hopefully as more sites become mobile-friendly, this will become less of a problem.”

10. Is this algorithm a real-time update or is it a delayed update? (8:00)

11. If I make my site mobile-friendly today, how long will it take Google to (8:44)

From Google:

“We determine whether a page is mobile-friendly every time it’s crawled and indexed — you don’t have to wait for another update. Once a page is mobile-friendly, you can wait for Googlebot for smartphones to naturally (re-)crawl and index the page or you can expedite processing by using Fetch as Google with Submit to Index in Webmaster Tools. For a large volume of URLs, consider submitting a sitemap. In the sitemap, if your mobile content uses pre-existing URLs (such as with Responsive Web Design or dynamic serving), also include the lastmod tag.”

12. Will other Google search verticals like Google Local results be affected by this update? (9:15)

13. Can you be partially mobile-friendly? (9:40)

14. When this update runs it course, how much of an effect with this have on my website and ranking results? (10:10)

15. What if my site still provides the best answers but I’m not mobile-friendly? (10:50)

From Google:

“While the mobile-friendly change is important, we still use a variety of signals to rank search results. The intent of the search query is still a very strong signal — so even if a page with high quality content is not mobile-friendly, it could still rank high if it has great content for the query.”

16. What about site speed? If my mobile website is slow, but my desktop website is fast, will my mobile rankings take a hit? (11:44)

17. Bonus: Will my site get deindexed from Google’s mobile search index if I don’t make it mobile-friendly? No chance. Despite what some may tell you, Google will not in deindex your site just because it isn’t mobile friendly.

18. Google Bonus: “I have a great mobile site, but the Mobile-Friendly Test tells me that my pages aren’t mobile-friendly. Why?”

“If a page is designed to work well on mobile devices, but it’s not passing the Mobile-Friendly Test, the most common reason is that Googlebot for smartphones is blocked from crawling resources, like CSS and JavaScript, that are critical for determining whether the page is legible and usable on a mobile device (i.e., whether it’s mobile-friendly). To remedy:

Check if the Mobile-Friendly Test shows blocked resources (often accompanied with a partially rendered image).
Allow Googlebot to crawl the necessary files.
Double-check that your page passes the Mobile-Friendly Test.
Use Fetch as Google with Submit to Index and submit your updated robots.txt to Google to expedite the re-processing of the updated page (or just wait for Google to naturally re-crawl and index).”

Sources:

Conclusion:

This mobile-friendly update represents another step in Google’s journey towards providing the most relavant, timely results for its visitors, no matter the device. At the core of Google’s business model is user experience. If Google doesn’t provide the best answers on all the devices its users are searching, their users will go elsewhere.

If you need help getting into Google’s “Mobile Friend Zone,” give us a call or send us a request for a one-on-one.