In a webmaster hangout, Google’s John Mueller explained why Google’s mobile algorithm update didn’t have a very big effect on many websites:
“I think one of the difficulties here is that it is a very broad change. So while it has had a fairly big impact across all the search results, it doesn’t mean that in every search result you will see very big changes. So that is something that affects a lot of different sites, a lot of different queries, but it is not such that the sites disappear from the search results completely if they are not mobile friendly.
On the one hand, that makes a lot of sense for the sites that aren’t able to go mobile friendly yet, maybe like small businesses who don’t have the time or the money to set their sites for that. These are results that are still fairly relevant in the search results, so we need to keep them in there somehow.
The other aspect that we noticed is that a lot of sites really moved forward on going mobile. So where we expected essentially a little bit of a bigger change, because of maybe bigger sites that weren’t mobile friendly, did take the time to go mobile friendly and with that, they didn’t see that much of a change.”
There are many more ranking signals
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