Cattle.com

Did you survive Mobilgeddon?

Did you survive?

Did the sun come up where you are?

No idea what the heck I’m talking about?

Two months ago, Google sent out notices to website owners that they would start penalizing sites in mobile search if their site didn’t work well on mobile devices.  It’s been coming for a long time, they were finally clear that they’ll start penalizing sites strongly today.

How can you know if your site is mobile friendly?

Go here…


…and put your site’s URL in to the page to see what happens.

Try it with other sites too, like Ranchhousedesigns.com and Steerplanet.com, both of which passed.

Then try it with a site like Cattle.com, which fails.

Why?

Because I wanted to see what happens.  Really.  And the answer is not much.  Over 50% of our traffic is from mobile devices but looking at the Google results this morning, it appears that we haven’t really dropped at all for any of our competitive terms.

So why am I talking about it today?

I didn’t update this site (yet, I’ll be doing it later today) because I own it and knowing what impact not updating it would have on mobile searches is actually valuable to me.

But YOUR site should be mobile friendly because it’s your site and you want it to look right in mobile devices.

Most importantly, if your web designer’s own website fails that test I posted up above, you really should take the opportunity to find a web designer who passes.  Not so much because you might or might not depend on mobile traffic, because those are the kind of little things a web designer worth their salt will be paying attention to anyway.

If your web designer isn’t paying enough attention to tech news to know something that h makes it onto mainstream news, they’re missing something else they could be doing for you.

So go to your web designers front page, run the test up above on their site, and call them if they fail.

If they tell you that stuff doesn’t matter, you’re using the wrong designer.