The Aftermath of the Google Mobile Update.

I know, I know. I’ve been falling behind here. Well in part it was because I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop and so far it hasn’t. We were all were warned and advised that the flip to mobile was going to be harmful to sites if you didn’t heed the warning and adjust your sites ahead of time.

Well so far one week in and I know its just one week in, all our rankings have gone up regardless of if the sites were responsive, a one page mobile site or not mobile friendly at all. To me that was all good news. I know more peril is on the horizon of course, but for now in week one, I’m very happy to report the state of our clients is great.

We made a lot of changes to our servers, to help improve how fast Google can grab a page. There were some pre-caching mechanisms that we put in place and they have helped dramatically. Over all our customer benefitted from our SEO expertise, something most web hosts don’t have.

We for years have all know that bad web hosting has a bad effect on web sites. Slightly off topic, I went to Pubcon last week in Austin and one of the points iI kept hearing over and over was how bad or cheap web hosting has a very negative impact on SEO and even more so web search. They recommended dedicated servers and companies that provide those services. I found that interesting because we’ve run our stuff here much differently, we run everything here as if it was dedicated and we often do things like tweek the servers so that they meet the Google standards, in this case a 200 millisecond load time. Yes you read that right. So that’s what we did here. I cant find any of our competitors that have that standard.

Anyway back on topic…

One thing that I did notice is that the breadcrumb trail seems to have taken on a new prominence. Google is showing more and more of that type information in both the desktop SERPs as wells as the mobile ones.  Most of all it seems that Google is still showing the most correct listing far more than if the site is what they deem mobile friendly. Our non mobile friendly sites that had strong breadcrumbs, seemed to actually move up and even outpace ‘mobile-friendly’ sites. In one case, i have the top 2 spots and the first mobile friendly site is #3.

I have samples quite a few terms off multiple platforms and the ranking seem to be consistent. If you built your site with the great content and the user experience  in mind, it seems that you came out of Mobligeddon, Mobilepocolyse or what ever you want to call it just fine.