Google’s Zineb Ait Bahajji from the Webmaster Trends team was quoted as saying at SMX Munich that the upcoming mobile-friendly ranking algorithm that will launch on April 21st will have more of an impact on Google’s search results than the Google Panda and Penguin update did.
Google did say when they announced the mobile-friendly ranking algorithm that this would have a “significant impact” on the mobile search results. This is the key, it is only impacting the mobile results and even so, it will have more of an impact than Panda or Penguin.
Zineb from Google did not specifically release a percentage of queries impacted. It is also believes that about 50% of all searches done on Google are on mobile devices.
The big takeaway from this is that if your site is not mobile-friendly, get to work now on it. If more than 40% of your traffic from Google comes from mobile devices, it sounds like if you are not mobile-friendly that virtually all of that traffic from mobile is at huge risk.
I also noticed that most of the top 10 mobile search results are Local listings or Informative websites. This makes it even more important to have proper local listings for your business on top local directories and review sites.
