By now, you may have already read about the upcoming changes Google is going to make in their search algorithms. It is said to be the biggest update in search algorithm after the Penguin, and may change the fate of many small and big websites.
While Penguin and Panda updates were focussed on fighting spam blogs and making quality content rank well, this update is aimed to improve the browsing experience of users on mobile phones.
[note note_color=”#fffda6″ radius=”5″]Note: This update will only affect the mobile search traffic and not the desktop traffic. You don’t need to anything else other the making your site mobile friendly by getting a responsive design. [/note]
From 21st April, your website needs to be mobile-friendly as it is going to be one of the most crucial factors in ranking the websites in mobile search.
If you are still not using a responsive WordPress theme for your blog, I highly recommend you do so ASAP to avoid any mishappening to your website. We use WP-Prosperity theme on most all the websites and all are mobile friendly.
But, let me tell you that, even if you are using a responsive WordPress theme, there are chances it is not rendering properly, which may result in google recognize it as a non-mobile friendly. One of my website happened to face that issue.
Google gives few potential solutions to it in their post about commons mistakes when making a mobile friendly site, check it out.
Recommended actions:
- Make sure that Googlebot can crawl your JavaScript, CSS and image files by using the “Fetch as Google” feature in Google Webmaster Tools. It will allow you to see exactly how Googlebot sees and renders your content, and it will help you identify and fix a number of indexing issues on your site.
- Check and test your robots.txt in Google Webmaster Tools.
- Test your mobile pages with the Mobile-Friendly Test to see if our systems detect your website as compatible for mobile users.
- If you use separate URLs for your mobile pages, make sure to test both the mobile and the desktop URLs, so you can confirm that the redirect is recognized and crawlable.
There are few files from the site, Google’s robots.txt was blocking, and I found that the whole wp-content folder was blocked in robots.txt. I don’t know when I made that change, maybe long ago, but it never really created any problem until now.
Well, anyway, removing wp-content from the robots.txt file fixed the problem and the site is now mobile-friendly.
Using a responsive WordPress theme is not the only way to get a mobile friendly design, you can simply install and activate WP-Touch plugin, which give a nice and clean design interface for the mobile visitors.
But, I would still recommend you to go for a responsive design as keeps the look of your pages pretty much the same on every device.
