On Thursday, February 26^th, 2015, Google did something which would ultimately leave the entire internet running around in a frantic, panicky, sweaty mess, trying to make their site more “mobile-friendly”. They announced an update, which was incredibly unusual given Google’s usual stubborn secrecy surrounding any changes.

“Starting April 21, we will be expanding our use of mobile-friendliness as a ranking signal. This change will affect mobile searches in all languages worldwide and will have a significant impact in our search results. Consequently, users will find it easier to get relevant, high quality search results that are optimized for their devices.”

Once the media caught wind of the announcement, all hell broke loose. All of a sudden, April 21^st 2015 was labelled as the day the Internet would collapse in an Apocalyptic style, “ Mobilegeddon ”. A day that would ultimately change the online landscape for businesses across the world.

So, a month on, now the smoke has somewhat cleared, what has really happened?

Well, to tell you the truth…

Not an awful lot.

The post-April 21^st yawn has left many twiddling their thumbs and shaking their head in disbelief at the time and effort spent optimising sites.

Brightedge recently published some data (see below), indicating no meaningful changes across the first 3 Search Engine Results Pages. However, one point which was noted, is the deeper you get into the search results, the impact becomes a little more noticable. The changes saw a 4% change on SERP 1, 6.6% change on SERP 2 and 9.59% change on SERP 3.

One suggestion put forward by Brightedge for the lack of movement, is that collectively the other ranking factors have outweighed the “significant” Mobile Friendly Update. Therefore reducing the impact it will have across the board.

In another test, Conrad Saam of searchengineland even found that non-mobile optimised sites had outperformed, responsive and optimised sites by 2%. (However, by his own admission the sample wasn’t the greatest ever assembled).

So why did Google state that this update would have such a “significant impact” when, in reality, changes appear to be very little?

One suggestion is that Google are trying to improve the state of the web and are using their considerable influence to do this. Something similar happened last year when Google announced sites using HTTPS, rather than the less secure HTTP, would affect rankings positively. Certainly a good idea; however the changes were barely noticeable.

Another idea was put forward by Mark Munroe, suggesting that as the update approached, the algorithm performed poorly and was reduced as a result. He states

“There is something fundamentally different about this update. In this case, Google would have been penalizing sites that users want to see in the results. This is quite different from Panda, which penalized poor quality, and Penguin, which penalized false reputations.

This penalty would have hit sites that deserve to rank normally but have some mobile issues. With so many of the Fortune 500 sites still not mobile-friendly, it would have been dinging sites that users want to see. So it’s possible that Google tuned down the algorithm to lessen its impact.”

One final possibility is that the roll out of the algorithm is incredibly slow. Like, incredibly slow. Implying that we shall see a gradual effect, rather than a sudden impact felt by Panda or Penguin for example. Given Google’s change from the norm and announcing the update six weeks prior, this could be a new and more transparent method of rolling-out updates.

The truth is, even if Google hadn’t changed its algorithm, as we move even further towards mobile, the websites that hadn’t optimised their sites would likely begin to lose online sales.