Mark your calendars. Set your clocks! Doomsday April 21, 2015. Are you ready for ZMOT?
It’s time to take a gander at what Google Analytics says about the overall mobile traffic to your Website. Check the stats under Audience > Mobile > Overview and look at the breakdown of desktop/mobile/tablet. Google has been paying close attention to these stats since 2011. On April 21, 2015 the next Google algorithm update may cause a seismic shift in their search engine results pages (SERPs).
This moment-of-truth has been coming by degrees for quite some time. In November 2014, Google added a “mobile-friendly” label to the SERP listings for qualifying sites. Google explains, “A page is eligible for the ‘Mobile-friendly’ label if it meets the following criteria as detected by Googlebot:
- Website software that’s compatible with mobile (so no Flash, for example)
- Large, readable text without zooming
- Content automatically resizes to fit the screen (so you don’t have to scroll horizontally)
- Large links with plenty of space between each so they are easily tapped
On February 26, 2015 Google dropped the other shoe: “Starting April 21, we will be expanding our use of mobile-friendliness as a ranking signal. This change will affect mobile searches in all languages worldwide and will have a significant impact in our search results.”
One of the easiest ways to see if your Website will suffer a ranking loss after the algorithm update is to check it at Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test site. At DesignWise Studios, all of the sites we design are mobile-friendly…
Mark your calendars. Doomsday April 21, 2015. Are you ready for ZMOT?
Posted by DesignWise Studios of Door County on Friday, April 10, 2015
Stephen Kastner is the founder of DesignWise Studios and Green Mountain Writers. His work spans storytelling, digital publishing, documentary filmmaking, photography, AI visibility strategy, and human-centered marketing. Beginning as a newspaper photojournalist in the 1980s and later building websites and online learning systems during the early internet era, he writes frequently about authenticity, media, communication, publishing, and the evolving relationship between technology and human identity.