Google’s Maile Ohye’s was at SES Miami this week for her keynote presentation where she talked quite a bit about Google’s upcoming mobile ranking signal change where mobile friendly sites get a boost in mobile search results.
The mobile ranking boost has been in the works for over a year, according to Ohye. This matches around the time Google – and especially Matt Cutts – began to really push how important it is to be mobile friendly, and stressing just how many searches were being done on mobile devices. This was when webmasters began to really consider the role mobile friendliness would play in SEO, knowing if Matt Cutts was stressing something so much, it was probably with good reason.
@maileohye says the April 21st mobile update will impact more queries than panda & penguin combined, & has been in dev over a year #SESMiami
— Todd Malicoat (@stuntdubl) March 26, 2015
We did already know that the impact would be greater than Penguin and Panda combined, when Google Webmaster Trends Analyst Zineb Ait Bahajji shared it while speaking at SMX Munich earlier this month.
