According to Google Webmaster Central, Google will be rolling out the most significant mobile algorithm change to date starting April 21. Google already owns the mobile revolution, with Android as the biggest mobile platform, Google Search as the biggest mobile search provider, and Play Store as the largest mobile app store. Google wants to push forward with more control over websites, and hence a 'mobile-friendly' algorithm update is inevitable. Here is what you can expect from the update starting April 21.
This is a significant change
This change will affect mobile searches in all languages worldwide and will have a significant impact in search results. What will be the actual impact of an algo change that is “significant”? It’s anyone’s guess. Already, we know that this update will be bigger than Panda or Penguin. We also know that Google considers mobile to be so significant that they are working to dominate nearly all of its manifestations. With this search update, we should brace ourselves for a major adjustment in the way that mobile search functions.
App indexing is important
App indexing is a new feature of the algorithm that will be exclusive to sites with associated Android apps. And according to Google Webmaster Central:
Starting today, we will begin to use information from indexed apps as a factor in ranking for signed-in users who have the app installed. As a result, we may now surface content from indexed apps more prominently in search.
The purpose of this feature is probably to tighten the connection between mobile search and mobile application. Eventually, there will probably be little distinction between the two. Bridging the gap via search is a logical choice.
Real-time algo
This algorithm will run in real-time, so technically, you can make changes any day, and as soon as Google picks up on the change, the site will start to benefit from the new mobile-friendly algorithm change.
Obviously, Google can only assess a site’s mobile friendliness when it crawls the page and indexes it for search. At this point, your site is scored. If the page is not mobile friendly on April 21, but becomes mobile-friendly on April 25, then we can assume that Google’s next crawl should be able to identify it as such.
Each page assessed individually
A notable feature of the mobile algorithm is that it analyzes mobile compatibility on a page-by-page basis, rather than a website-wide basis. So if your site has some mobile-optimized pages, but some non-optimized ones, then Google will look at them separately and promote the ones that are optimized. They won’t “penalize” an entire site based on the off chance that a few pages aren't optimized.
The exact details of the algo are yet to be confirmed. Let's sit tight and wait for April 21st. What we do know is, Google is leading the way forwards in mobile, and you will have to adopt to it or die in search result pages.
Best of luck :)
