Did you catch this weeks lurid B-movie style headlines such as “Want to survive Mobilegeddon?” and “Businesses Brace for Mobilegeddon?!” The doomsday predictions proliferated prior to the 21st April deadline imposed by Google but the sky did not fall on Tuesday and the entire event turned out to be a pretty damp squib...
So, just in case this one passed you by, what exactly is Mobilegeddon? Apart from being a rather clumsy word mash of ‘mobile’ and ‘armageddon’ it basically referred to Googles latest tweak to its search algorithm. The main facet of the change is that they will now favour websites in search that are more mobile-friendly. Meaning? Companies which have sites that meet Google's mobile standards will rank higher in search results on smartphones.
That doesn’t sound even vaguely scary does it? So why all the overblown hysteria? Well, maybe unsurprisingly, many small businesses don’t have mobile ready websites. However, what is more interesting, is that many big businesses also suffer from the same problem. In fact, a recent study by Pure Oxygen Labs claims that over 40% of the Fortune 500 companies do not have a mobile compatible site.
The reality though is that mobile-friendliness isn’t the only determinant for search results so although some sites will lose a modicum of traffic it’s not as if it will suddenly fall off a cliff. Also getting your website compatible with the new Google algorithm is not that difficult, time consuming or expensive. As one pundit on Forbes described it “I don’t think this is the end of the world for most folks.”
Industry analysts seem to believe that the conspiracy theorists have managed to make this story thrive within media circles when frankly, there was really very little to tell. The melodramatic name probably had a lot to do with that. And Google themselves have kept quiet because, well lets face it, it’s all decent publicity for them.
That said, although this hasn’t turned out to be such a big deal for consumers or businesses, there is possibly a much bigger incentive for Google... Although their desktop search and associated ad model is still the global leader, they really need to focus on mobile for their future. Again here they are dominant but arguably not untouchable. Their mobile search revenue fell to 68% in 2014, from 83% just two years ago, according to eMarketer. That's largely because mobile users often tend to use specific apps when searching on their smartphones (eg. going straight to the Amazon app instead of using Google's search function to locate them).
The excessive hyperbole surrounding Mobilegeddon in the past week reminded me of the much vaunted Y2K / Millennium Bug nonsense at the turn of the last century. Way back then, we were all sucked into a media created maelstrom based on the premise that computers would fail en-masse, planes would fall from the sky and we would wake up from our New Years Eve hangover to a world which resembled a scene from The Terminator. The reality was a tad more mundane. The only problem most of us were confronted with that morning was how we could reset the clock on our VCR's.
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