So Google finally flipped the switch this week on the thing the SEO blogs have been screaming about since February — "Mobilegeddon," which is a genuinely terrible name but it stuck, so here we are. As of April 21st, mobile-friendliness is now a ranking factor for Google's mobile search results. If your site doesn't play nice on a phone screen, it can get bumped down when someone searches from their phone. Desktop rankings aren't touched, just mobile. That's it. That's the whole apocalypse.
I ignored every warning about this for about two months because I assumed it didn't apply to me. Techpad runs on a theme I swapped in back in late 2013 specifically because it claimed to be responsive, so I figured I was fine and went about my life. Then Tuesday night, around 11pm, sitting in bed with my laptop like an idiot instead of sleeping, I got paranoid and actually ran this blog through Google's mobile-friendly testing tool. There's a little green "Page is mobile friendly" result you want to see. I did not see it. I got a warning about a missing viewport meta tag, which, embarrassing, because I definitely had one at some point and apparently lost it during some copy-paste header edit I did probably a year ago and never noticed because I never actually load my own blog on my phone (who does that, honestly, its my blog, I wrote it).
Fixed it in about four minutes once I found the problem. One line back in the header. Re-ran the test, got my green checkmark, went to bed feeling dumb but relieved. If you run any kind of site and you haven't checked this, go do it now, it takes thirty seconds and costs you nothing to find out.
What's actually kind of funny is watching this ripple through people I know. My friend Priya runs a little photography portfolio site on a WordPress theme from 2011, and when I told her about this she tested it and it was a disaster — the whole thing is fixed-width, 960 pixels, so on a phone you get this tiny sliver of a photo gallery you have to pinch and zoom just to see a single image at readable size. She's been putting off a redesign for two years and now she's got an actual reason to stop putting it off. I don't think Mobilegeddon is going to tank her business or anything dramatic like that, but it's the kind of nudge that gets people to fix something they should've fixed already.
And can we talk for a second about how bad some sites still are on mobile in 2015? I was on my phone last week trying to look up a restaurant's hours and their site loaded as this desktop layout scaled down to nothing, text the size of a grain of rice, a nav bar you had to zoom into just to tap the right link. This happens constantly. So honestly, good, let Google shove people into fixing it. I know the framing of "the algorithm is coming for you" is a little much, every time Google changes anything the SEO industry acts like the sky is falling, remember when everyone panicked about Panda and Penguin like it was a natural disaster. But underneath the hyperbole this one's actually a reasonable thing for them to do. Mobile search traffic passed desktop a while back for a lot of sites, mine included some months, so ranking mobile-friendliness for mobile results isn't some radical power grab, it's just Google catching up to how people are actually using the internet.
I'm aware this is also, technically, launch week for a certain wrist computer that every single tech outlet on the planet is currently covering in exhaustive detail, hour by hour unboxing videos and all. I'm not touching that one here. Not because I don't have opinions (I have opinions, mainly about the price of the Edition model, which is deeply funny to me), just because there's nothing I could add to that conversation that fifty other blogs aren't already saying today. Go read one of those instead if that's what you're after.
I'm going to go check whether my RSS feed icon looks right on a 5-inch screen now, since apparently I can't be trusted to have checked anything on mobile for the last year and a half.