Mobilegeddon is a name forGoogle's search enginealgorithm update of April 21, 2015.[1] The term was coined by Chuck Price in a post written forSearch Engine Watch on March 9, 2015. The term was then adopted by webmasters and web-developers.
The main effect of this update was to give priority to websites that display well on smartphones and other mobile devices. The change did not affect searches made from adesktop computer or alaptop.[2]
Google announced its intention to make the change in February 2015.[3] In addition to their announcement, Google published an article, "Mobile Friendly Sites," on theirGoogle Developers page to helpwebmasters with the transition.[4] Google claims the transition to mobile-friendly sites was to improve user experience, stating "the desktop version of a site might be difficult to view and use on a mobile device."[4]
Theprotologism is ablend word of "mobile" and "Armageddon" because the change "could cause massive disruption to page rankings."[5] But, writing forForbes, Robert Hof says that concerns about the change were "overblown" in part because "Google is providing a test to see if sites look good on smartphones".[6]
Search engine results pages on smartphones now show URLs in "breadcrumb" format, as opposed to the previous explicit format.[7]
Based on their data set, software companySearchmetrics found that the average loss of rankings for the non-mobile friendly sites measured was 0.21 positions on average.[8] Content marketing companyBrightEdge has tracked over 20,000 URLs since the update, and is reporting a 21% decrease in non-mobile-friendly URLs on the first 3 pages of search results.[9] According to Peter J. Meyers, it was "nothing to write home about."[10]
