Google Mobile Penalty Study: Day 2 – Mobile Search Traffic up 15%, but…

Conrad Saam | April 23, 2015

So, we are now 2 days into Google’s roll-0ut of their mobile penalty.  We’ve added 5 new sites to the study – and if you’d like help in benchmarking your own site’s performance, give us a call and we’ll show you how.  So now – across the 59 sites we’re monitoring – across those with a mobile friendly platform we’re seeing traffic up 15%.  (Note this isn’t an average number, its an aggregate number of mobile search traffic across all of the sites.)

But…

The 12 non mobile friendly sites have seen traffic up 32%.  Explanation please?  We sometimes see these upward spikes at the early stage of an algo change OR (more likely) a few outliers are having an inordinate impact on a small data set – stay tuned.  OR (and i’m believing this last explanation to be true) the algo is either rolling out very slowly or the impact of the change is going to be much less than telegraphed.

In the graph below – blue bars are mobile friendly, red are not – and this represents a sample of the more trafficked sites in the study.