10 Years Ago This Week: Mobilegeddon!

To celebrate 10 years of Creator Weekly, I’m sharing tech highlights from 2015 that still resonate 10 years later. This update was for the week ending February 28, 2015.

On February 26, 2015 Google Search announced that they would be "finding more mobile-friendly websites in the search results" by using mobile-friendliness of web pages as a ranking signal for searches on mobile devices. 

The goal: "users will find it easier to get relevant, high quality search results that are optimized for their devices." Ever an imaginative (and melodramatic) bunch, search engine optimizers (SEOs) started calling it Mobilegeddon. 

Watch the Mobilegeddon! short on YouTube.

While this change ushered in the start of the mobile-first era for Google Search, this first update wasn't too brutal, at least in restrospect. 

It only affected Search rankings on mobile devices, and would apply to individual web pages, rather than entire websites. 

The change would go into effect on April 21, 2015, giving webmasters almost two months to make sure their sites would pass the mobile-friendly test. Sure, not that much time if you hadn't started thinking about how your site rendered on a mobile device.  And Google did say it would have a "significant impact" on the search results.

But fortunately most content management systems at least offered a mobile template. 

At the time, I wrote about how to make sure you had a mobile version set for your Blogger blog, with just a few clicks. (Blogger would finally get responsive themes, the configuration recommended by Google, in 2017.)

Google also offered a Mobile-Friendly Test Site, where you could enter a web page URL and Google would report back on whether it passed the mobile-friendliness test and a Mobile Usability Report in Webmaster Tools. Google wanted all the sites to pass the test. 

And Google noted that mobile-friendliness required updating the old YouTube Flash embeds, which YouTube had effectively killed just a few weeks earlier. 

Mobilegeddon?

"Few things get a webmaster’s attention quite like waking up to a Twitter feed filled with news about a major algorithm update. In the world of SEO, hummingbirds, pandas, and penguins are akin to the Horsemen of the Apocalypse." ~ Chuck Price

Writing about the update, Chuck Price from Search Engine Watch termed it Mobilegeddon, and the name caught on.

Despite the title, his article offered practical measured suggestions about what to consider to make sure your site was ready for the change. 

And after all, it turned out this update was not only not a catastrophe, most websites saw very little change in how their pages ranked in mobile search.

But it did push site owners to finally make sure their sites were fully available on mobile devices.

Moving to a mobile-first Search index

October 2023: Google announced Mobile-first indexing has landed

This was just one step towards a mobile-first Google Search index.

In November 2016, Google announced their first steps towards mobile-first indexing of websites: 

"To make our results more useful, we've begun experiments to make our index mobile-first. Although our search index will continue to be a single index of websites and apps, our algorithms will eventually primarily use the mobile version of a site's content to rank pages from that site, to understand structured data, and to show snippets from those pages in our results."

This was a slow transition, and it wasn't until 2023 that Google declared victory, noting that a mobile web page had to be as complete and usable as the desktop version. 

"Over the years, mobile web traffic has continued to grow; in some regions, people almost exclusively use their phone to access the internet. Thank you — site-owners, SEOs, web-developers, designers, and everyone who works on websites — for helping to make the mobile web a success!"

And finally, on July 5, 2024 Google made their final update. 

Essentially all sites are now crawled the Googlebot Smartphone Crawler. Google noted "If your site's content is not accessible at all with a mobile device, it will no longer be indexable."  The vast majority of websites weren't affected at all. 

If you want to make sure your site is optimized for mobile, check out Google's list of tips and best practices.

The Future

This is one of the few updates where it feels like the change is done. We are now living in a mobile-first world. 

I don't think that means there won't be changes. There always are. 

Maybe there will be new devices to optimize for (TVs?). Or maybe the next focus will be optimizing for AI-generated Search Results. 

But something that really struck me was how hard Google pushed this. 

Yes, people were already using their phones for search in 2015, but Google's aggressive changes in mobile indexing really forced website owners to update their sites or be left behind. 

Were they following user trends? Or creating them? It feels like both.

So whatever the next step is, pay attention to what direction Google is asking you to move in. 

References

Google Webmaster Central Blog (now Google Search Central Blog), 26 February 2015: Finding more mobile-friendly search results (original post at the Internet Archive).

Chuck Price at Search Engine Watch, 9 March 2015: "Mobilegeddon" Is Coming on April 21 - Are You Ready? (via Internet Archive)

Pew Research, 1 April 2015: US Smartphone Use in 2015

Google Webmaster Central Blog (now Google Search Central Blog), 21 April 2015: Rolling out the mobile-friendly update (original post at the Internet Archive)

Google Webmaster Central Blog (now Google Search Central Blog), 21 April 2015: FAQs about the April 21st Mobile-Friendly Update

Google Webmaster Central Blog (now Google Search Central Blog), 27 April 2015: #MobileMadness: a campaign to help you go mobile-friendly (Internet Archive)

Peter J. Meyers at The Moz Blog, 22 April 2015: 7 Days After Mobilegeddon: How Far Did the Sky Fall?

Pew Research Spring 2015 Global Attitudes Survey, 22 February 2016: Smartphone Ownership and Internet Usage Continues to Climb in Emerging Economies

Google Webmaster Central Blog (now Google Search Central Blog), 4 November 2016: Mobile-first Indexing (original post at the Internet Archive)

Patrick Reinhart at Search Engine Journal, 11 December 2017: 
Mobilegeddon: A Complete Guide to Google’s Mobile-Friendly Update

Google Search Central Blog, 31 October 2023: Mobile-first indexing has landed - Thanks for all your support

Google Search Central Blog, 3 June 2024: Mobile-indexing-vLast-final-final.doc