Thank you to everyone who joined our webinar with Tim Ruder and Chris Muller last Thursday to talk about mobile discovery and the upcoming Google mobile-friendly algorithm update. That update, scheduled to roll out beginning April 21, represents a dramatic change in mobile search results that we hope you are well positioned to handle.
In case you weren’t able to attend, you can watch the full video of our discussion below and view the slide deck here:
You asked a number of great questions during and after the webinar and we thought it would be worth highlighting some of the most popular ones here:
You mentioned that web pages need to load as fast as 1 second for mobile users. Can you elaborate on that a little more?
The one-second recommendation comes from Google’s blog post Making Smartphone Sites Load Fast, and is reiterated in the help file Mobile Analysis in PageSpeed Insights.
We should focus not on the one second target, but on the fact that page speed optimizations will have a more visible impact on mobile devices than desktop. We recommend that you start by reading the blog post and linked resources (above), as well as Google Team’s comments below it. The bottom line: Unless your mobile pages already load very quickly on a 3g network, your traffic and KPIs will both benefit from optimizing your page speed.
Is Google going to base a website’s mobile-friendliness using crawls done before 4/21? Or only on crawls after that date?
Google talks about this change as a “real-time” signal. This means that Googlebot will make the mobile-friendly determination any time it crawls a page – once you fix a page to make it mobile friendly, Google will pick it up. For most sites, we recommend launching mobile-friendly pages at least a week ahead of the 4/21 launch so they can be crawled before the ranking change kicks in.
When I do a Google search on my mobile phone today, I’m already seeing “mobile-friendly” notations amongst the search results. Is Google already rolling out this new algorithm?
If you see the mobile-friendly tag on all of your pages today, you should be ok. If you’re seeing this tag on your home page already, our recommendation is to use the mobile usability report in Webmaster Tools to verify that all of your pages pass the test.
I thought Taboola recommended sponsored and branded content. Why are you helping sites with SEO?
Our goal at Taboola is to help our partners grow their business and reach their KPIs, whatever those may be. You may know us best as a discovery platform, but we also offer one-on-one consulting, have a speaker series (Taboola Talks) to help showcase successful tactics other partners are using, sponsor and present at various conferences around the world, and we’ll be presenting more webinars like this as the year goes on. We also have free tools to help partners manage their own sponsored content, share traffic with other sites, and A/B test your content and automate curation.
Is there anything else we can do to help you reach your goals?
