Reddit has lost out from the Mobile Friendly update, losing its rankings

It has been six days since the implementation of Google’s Mobile Friendly algorithm, and while the algorithm progressively rolls-out, we’ve been waiting eagerly to see whether the impact of Mobilegeddon will be as destructive to the rankings of websites as predicted.

Search Metrics, who consistently track how large companies and websites rank for their key search terms, have now reported on the sites that they think have been impacted the most so far by the new algorithmic update:

As can be seen from Search Metric’s results, news site Reddit has not only seen a 27% loss in visibility, but this loss has been predominantly for mobile device SERPs.

These results are provisional only as the mobile update may take up to three weeks to fully roll-out.

Reddit is “Mobile Friendly” but still in Beta – Could this be the reason for their downturn?

We took a look at Reddit in the search results, and Google has labelled their site as “Mobile Friendly”, and since the Mobile Friendly algorithm does not gauge how well optimised a site is for mobile devices on a scale, this should mean that the Mobile Friendly algorithm is not impacting their results.

However, the site does appear to be experiencing some teething problems as their mobile site is still in Beta testing:

There are a number of images missing from the home page, and there is very little content above the fold, so the recent downturn in rankings for mobile devices could potentially be due to Panda algorithmic factors.

Once Reddit has finished constructing the mobile version of their website it is very likely that they will see their mobile rankings regenerated.

Reddit isn’t the only one

The jury’s still out whether or not Reddit’s loss of visibility in the SERPs is due to the Mobile Friendly update, but they’re not the only site that seems to have had their rankings nuked in the last few days. Other large news sites such as nbcsports.com and fool.com have taken major hits to their visibility.

These two sites are not currently seen by Google as “Mobile Friendly”:

It should be noted that as news sites, these two sites may have believed that they were somewhat immune to the radioactive effects of Mobilegeddon, seeing as how this algorithmic update has no effect on the news page of Google. However their visibility has suffered in the standard web results page of Google and therefore these sites may now look to create a “Mobile Friendly” version.

As previously stated, the results we are seeing are preliminary only, and may be a prelude to a far more catastrophic fallout that we are due to see as the new algorithmic update progresses!

Do you believe we have more to see from Mobilegeddon? Let us know what you think in the comments section below!