# April 21st Google Update



## TPrintDesigner (Sep 16, 2007)

I've not seen this discussed here even tho it's all over the internet.

From The official Google Blog

"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."

Basically, if your site is not mobile friendly then get something done about it quickly. Take the Google test here: Is your site ready?


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## marzatplay (May 25, 2014)

Posted by someone in the comments section...

Just to clarify a point that seems to be widely misinterpreted: “This change will affect mobile searches in all languages worldwide. ” If you have people trying to search for your content from a mobile device, your SERP position in a mobile browser will be lower if Google considers your page unfriendly. But reading this literally, if you have a site Google doesn't deem as mobile friendly, but most of your traffic comes from desktops, the SERP position in a desktop search would seem to be unaffected.


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## TPrintDesigner (Sep 16, 2007)

50% of searches are from mobiles, it will be even higher by the second quarter.

I wouldn't want to lose that traffic...


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## marzatplay (May 25, 2014)

TPrintDesigner said:


> 50% of searches are from mobiles, it will be even higher by the second quarter.
> 
> I wouldn't want to lose that traffic...


50%? Where did you get that number from? If true...lots of sales lost for those unprepared.


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## TPrintDesigner (Sep 16, 2007)

marzatplay said:


> 50%? Where did you get that number from? If true...lots of sales lost for those unprepared.


Mobile-Search-Will-Surpass-Desktop-2015

Matt Cutts predicted it early last year.


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## marzatplay (May 25, 2014)

Did a test and it appears Deco Network and Inksoft are not mobile friendly solutions apparently.


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## NoXid (Apr 4, 2011)

Cool that they provide that testing page.

I do a little web development for friends, and one has been very concerned about whether his site would show up in mobile searches ... he knows _nothing_ about this sort of thing, so I guess he must have heard some doom and gloom blather in the media about this coming change by Google. Anyway, I ran his URL against the test page and it is perfect. It is mostly just a matter of detecting the screen size and switching between a mobile oriented and a computer oriented CSS as needed (which is about making sure stuff fits on the screen and hiding anything for which that is impossible).

Thanks for the heads-up! My friend would have continued to panic for no reason had I not seen this post.


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## TPrintDesigner (Sep 16, 2007)

We use the Opencart/Journal framework for shirttools which is responsive and passes the test. For my other sites I use Bootstrap which is just awesome for building responsive sites from scratch.

Twitter Bootstrap


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## goodtease (Nov 29, 2006)

Mine passed! Thanks for heads up


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## SunEmbroidery (Oct 18, 2007)

I received an email from Google Webmaster Tools today saying that I need to fix mobile usability my site. I'm not too worried because most of my users are desktop people but its definitely a concern. I plan to move to a mobile-friendly template sometime.


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## PyramidPrintWrx (Jan 16, 2014)

Thanks for the reminder!


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## LindaLittleHat (Oct 1, 2009)

We're using shirttools and we just passed the test, thanks Dean!


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## tchandler52 (Sep 17, 2012)

Thanks for this. I checked all of my sites also. They are mobile friendly.


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## HappyHaole (Jan 12, 2015)

I'm good!

In the metrics of my site management I can actually see mobile views and desktop views separately.
I'm using Square-space.


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## TPrintDesigner (Sep 16, 2007)

Just a heads up, the Google link checks a single page and not the whole site.

You need to make sure each page passes. Many of us have embedded distributors catalogues via an iFrame which can screw things up. You might also have wide images, for instance on a gallery page so be careful.


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## PatWibble (Mar 7, 2014)

TPrintDesigner said:


> Just a heads up, the Google link checks a single page and not the whole site.
> 
> You need to make sure each page passes. Many of us have embedded distributors catalogues via an iFrame which can screw things up. You might also have wide images, for instance on a gallery page so be careful.


Do all pages of the site have to pass?
My homepage fails, so that will obviously need fixing, but most of my product pages pass. There are a few pages further down the navigation that fail - mainly pages that detail artwork requirements and some terms and conditions. It is not essential (to me) that these be mobile friendly. If they are not accepted by google, will that effect my ranking?


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## TPrintDesigner (Sep 16, 2007)

Hi

The only person who can answer that with certainty is Google but if it were my site then I would want every page working properly. No point risking it, mobile internet access and search is exploding.


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## LindaLittleHat (Oct 1, 2009)

Some of our designer pages fail (where the customer designs their graphics). I was told that these pages should be removed from google index so the search engine doesn't see it. Is this hard to do or do i need a web tech to do it? for each designer page?


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## SunEmbroidery (Oct 18, 2007)

If those pages are disallowed in your robots.txt file they won't be crawled by the Google bots. If you don't have a robots.txt file you should have one anyway. You would need to be able to add a file to the root section of your web. The file can be created in Notepad. You can google for examples.

I believe individual pages (not entire web sites) are judged for mobile-friendliness so I don't know if you really need to not have your designer pages crawled because that shouldn't effect your mobile-friendly pages although there may be other reasons why you would want to do that.


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## jaredhite1 (Sep 3, 2014)

I think SunEmbroidery is right, there wouldn't be any SEO benefit to preventing bots from indexing your designer pages even if they're not responsive. Google hasn't said that having just a few pages that aren't responsive will hurt the mobile search rating of your entire site as far as I know. 

Better to let them crawl your whole site so if your non-responsive page is a good enough match it will still show up in the results.


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## LindaLittleHat (Oct 1, 2009)

Thanks for the input!


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