The Google News team has revealed that, for the moment at least, the mobile friendliness of websites will not affect their ranking on the Google News results page.

While most webmasters are anticipating the implementation of Google’s new Mobile-Friendly algorithm, Google News publishers will be able to procrastinate when it comes to getting their websites mobile optimised.

“As of now Google News is not committed to making that change just yet”

This news comes after Stacie Chan, the Google News community manager revealed on a Google+ Hangout https://plus.google.com/events/chm1eltb9vdfa0ssggai9la7a8g that at this moment in time, the Google News team are not looking to apply the Mobile Friendly algorithm to the News page.

The question about how whether or not the mobile algorithm will affect the mobile news page was asked by John Mueller from Switzerland, as can be seen here:

“We don’t have a set timeline or anything like that, or whether or not we’ll even implement that into [Google News]”

Stacie indicates that the roll-out of the mobile algorithm into Google News may never happen (or at least not in the foreseeable future).

Why the Google News team have made the decision to not apply the mobile algorithm to the news results has not been made clear, but it may be a case of wanting to see how the algorithmic change affects the search results first before making the decision to implement it on the news page.

Some News Sites Are Still Not Mobile Friendly

Part of the reason may be due to the fact that the new Mobile-Friendly algorithm ignores the site speed of the mobile version of a website, and instead uses the site speed of the desktop version.

Why is this crucial? Because many news sites have a separate mobile version of their website, and as a result may lose their rankings on mobile devices.

Here is an example of a test done on a EuroNews page:

Having a news results page that does not include some of the largest news sites like EuroNews.com because their pages are deemed Not mobile-friendly could be a problem.

Perhaps the Google News team are waiting to see if more of the large news sites catch up and optimise their sites for mobile devices before rolling out the algorithm to reduce the potential fall-out.