Google’s Mobile-Friendly Algorithm Fails to Use Mobile Site Speed to Gauge Mobile Site Ranking, And Instead Uses Desktop Site Speed

You would think that having a fast loading mobile site would count towards your website’s ranking on mobile phones… but it seems that instead Google use the speed of your desktop site. So as long as you have a fast desktop site, your mobile rankings will not be affected by having a site that loads slowly on mobile phones.

The new algorithm is set to launch on the 21^st of April, and is supposed to run in real-time. This effectively means that as soon as you improve the speed and responsiveness of any of your webpages, and Google’s algorithm picks up these changes, your website will see the benefits of this.

Gary Illyes from Google, has stated that the algorithm works on a page-by-page basis, so that if your website has 100 pages, and 20 of those pages are not mobile friendly, only these pages will be negatively impacted by the update – not the whole website.

Having a fast loading mobile site may help your users, but it won’t help your rankings!

This is all useful to know, but if the speed of your desktop site is being used to determine the ranking of your mobile site, then it means you will not see any benefit from having a separate mobile site which loads 20x faster than the desktop version of your site.

You may be providing a good experience to users by presenting them with an extremely fast loading page, but this will not count towards the ranking of that page in the SERPs.

It appears that the main way to benefit from the algorithm is to make sure that the desktop version of your website is fast loading on both desktop and mobile devices.

Do you think this new algorithmic update is fair to webmasters or internet users? Feel free to comment at the bottom of the page.