It’s no surprise that mobile is super important. It’s 50 to 60 percent of most of our clients’ traffic volume these days. But, what is surprising is Google’s recent announcement that they would only look at the mobile content for search ranking purposes.

What that means is that if you have a website that your mobile site displays different content than your desktop site, Google will officially start ignoring your desktop content and only showing the mobile content.

Now, we see this a lot on clients that maybe have a “.m” or a “m.” for their mobile site, rather than having a responsive website. On the “m.”, they would have different content. Maybe stripped down content, maybe they eliminate the footer altogether.

They don’t have as big a description, which makes sense from a mobile user point of view. They want to just show you the most important things.

The challenge is if you have a bunch of links to other internal pages in your footer that aren’t showing on mobile, Google won’t be crawl those links anymore.

If you have written content describing your business, Google won’t be looking at that content as part of its search ranking algorithm.

It’ll still display your desktop version for desktop search, but even on desktop search, it’s going to use your mobile site content for ranking purposes.

It doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, and I know a lot of people in the industry think it’s an odd decision, but that’s the decision, so let’s get used to it and start updating our mobile sites.

Thanks so much reading. Feel free to reach out to us. We look forward to hearing from you.

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