User Experience Makes a Lovely Carrot, But Google Provides the Stick

All the sites we build today are mobile friendly (responsive). But that has not always been the case. We've been building websites since "smart phone" meant a phone, hidden in a shoe.We're proud to say we have a significant number of websites still humming happily along on decidedly older code bases. This speaks to the longevity of their effectiveness as well as to our long-term client relationships. It also illustrates an occasional reluctance to re-invest in improving and modernizing a critical marketing and communications tool.

Well, Google may force some modernization with their latest algorithm updates. According to Jim Stewart, SEO specialist and founder of Stew Art Media:

“Google has over 200 ranking signals it uses to decide how it ranks pages, and being mobile-friendly will be a major one. So while they haven’t said there will be a penalty for not having a mobile-friendly site, a site that isn’t mobile-friendly will sit below one that is mobile-friendly.”

It will be interesting to see how much the notion of negative search optimization impacts will change website owners' opinion of making in investment in more contemporary code and a better user experience.

Read Google's own post about the upcoming changes:

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com.au/2015/02/finding-more-mobil...