SEO Watch: Mobilegeddon

Nick Garner from 90 Digital looks at the impending Google Mobilegeddon update, explains the reasons behind it and the key facts everyone needs to know

Welcome to the first edition of SEO Watch. This is a monthly column covering the big strategic questions affecting search engine optimisation and the egaming sector. It will also look at the practical side of search engine optimisation to help readers get actionable information.

For my opening article, I’m covering something which has had a huge impact on every egaming operator over the past year: mobile. There’s a massively important Google update which will have been launched by the time this article goes to press, therefore I’m going to talk in ‘what will be’ as nobody has any real idea of what scale of disruption this significant algorithm update will have.Anyhow, let’s get on with explaining what’s coming up: Mobilegeddon.

It makes sense that operators and affiliates will really care about their prominence on mobile search. Recent statistics from comScore show that in 2014, 29% of all search queries came from mobile, so mobile search is something to take very seriously when you combine it with its vast revenue potential.

Google have a strategy of planning years ahead when it comes to making large changes to search engine. With mobile, they have been gently but persistently talking up the importance of mobile friendliness since 2009.

Back in November 2014 Google stepped up the pace on mobile by doing three things:
1. They started to actively identify sites which were mobile friendly or unfriendly 2. Search results on mobile were badged up with a tag saying ‘mobile-friendly’, as an alert to users
3. Finally they introduced a mobile friendliness testing tool so Webmasters could see if their site fulfilled Google’s requirements for being mobile friendly.

Now, six months later, as of 21 April 2015 Google will launch what the search marketing industry describe as ‘Mobilegeddon’. This is the most dramatic change in the search engine algorithm since Hummingbird which came out in August 2013.

When announcing the update, they said: “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.” And when Google talk about significant impact on search results, it means dramatic change is coming for those sites which do not meet Google’s criteria for being mobile friendly.

What to expect
Google should be launching a new crawler specifically designed for mobile. It’s probably going to be an Android user agent which can do a better job of crawling single page web apps, Android apps and generally making more sense of Java and JavaScript. For the less technical reader, simply Google are doing things to understand mobile web pages better.

Up until now, the search results you see on your mobile phone are essentially an adjusted version of the desktop search results. To give you some perspective on this, a company called Searchmetrics have a crawler which looks at Google search results both on desktop and mobile. As of now, they state there is a 36% variance between desktop and mobile Google indexes. However that statistic doesn’t really give the full picture for egaming.

Google has progressively made mobile search much more geographically centred, in other words if I do a query for ‘restaurants’, I’ll get local restaurants on my mobile phone because Google assumes I’m looking for restaurants around me. However, because egaming is non-geographically focused (if I look for ‘free bet’ it’s completely non-geographic as a search query) the difference between mobile and desktop search results in egaming is probably more in the region of 20%. But this is about to change.

Now we expect a unique version of Google specifically for mobile, ranking mobile-centric content like web applications which previously could not be understood by Google. For anyone in egaming, this means Google should be able to understand the content for a mobile casino game, assuming it can actually index it.

When we talk about ‘significant impact in search results’, for egaming, I believe it will mean a real decoupling between desktop and mobile search results for big phrases like ‘online casino’ where currently so many results take users straight into application pages that have nothing to do with the search query they came in on.

Reality check
Recently, because of the Google mobile update announcement, there have been many interesting studies looking at the number of mobile friendly sites out there. An agency called Portent tested 25,000 randomised websites from a 1 million long list of sites from a company called Majestic. At least 10,000 of this sample failed Google’s mobile friendliness test. When 40% of sites fail, there are some serious problems for both Google and site owners, because Google can’t just expel 40% of all websites.

If this happened, users would become dissatisfied with Google and abandon that search engine, so there is always going to be a balance between Google forcing mobile friendliness for long-term user satisfaction and in the short-term, users getting what they want.

Questions, questions
The big question operators will be asking is if my site isn’t mobile friendly will it damage my desktop rankings? The simple answer is no because it’s a mobile only update. The next will be how much will my mobile rankings be impacted? According to a trusted source within Google, this will be greater than the impact of either Penguin or Panda updates. For those unfamiliar with what I’m talking about, there are big updates that affected huge numbers of sites and this mobile update is on a greater scale.

What about sites redirected to a mobile subdomain? It’s likely Google will simply look at the mobile friendliness of the mobile subdomain or mobile site and rank it accordingly. Redirects are simply a way of pointing both users and search engines to a particular destination, so it’s unlikely to be a problem.

You can find out if your site is mobile friendly by using Google’s mobile friendliness tool, and it will label your site on search results as mobile friendly. If your site or brand has an app it’s unlikely to help a great deal, however. A mobile application isn’t a ranking signal in itself, however Google are more likely to surface more apps in their search queries than before, so an app could give you more search real estate. But the answer is open to debate.

The egaming landscape
We’re getting towards some conclusions, but to make this article really useful it’s time to look at our own neighbourhood and see which operators and affiliates have mobile friendly sites. For this article, I did a piece of research looking at the mobile friendliness of the egaming sector. I started out by looking at the biggest sites in the industry: paddypower. com, williamhill.com, betfair.com, ladbrokes.com, bet365.com and Betvictor.com, along with a number of affiliate websites.

Using a number of tools in combination, I came up with this headline result:

46% of the sample list of egaming operators passed the Google mobile friendliness test

62% of affiliates passed the Google mobile friendliness test

What does this mean? Well, depending on how aggressive Google get with operator websites on mobile, it will either be a massive opportunity for affiliates to fill the vacuum, or nothing much will happen. My best guess is that Google will not suddenly turn the search results upside down, but will progressively down rank non-mobile friendly sites over a few months.

Next month, I’ll do a recap on what actually happened, so see you then.