Punishing the Sluggish Sites
We are living in the modern age of the internet. Gone are the days when you’d have to wait several minutes so that the webpage can load. Everything on the internet nowadays is ultra-fast. If you fail to catch up with the speed standards of today, then you are definitely going to be left behind.
The same is the case when it comes to websites. Search engines such as Google have now started evaluating websites according to their speeds. The faster the website, the higher its rank in the search results.
One of the reasons why Google in particular has started to rank websites according to their speeds is because slow websites waste time. No one has time to spare while waiting for a webpage to load. It is quite frustrating, and people today get annoyed quite easily. Therefore, Google has decided to punish such websites in this way.
SEO is Still One of the Deciding Factors
If you are worried that this new update is going to rank irrelevant websites with a faster speed above websites with relevant content, then that’s not going to happen. Google is still giving SEO the utmost priority in this update as well. However, the speed is the deciding factor only with websites that have relevant content.
Mobile-first Indexing
This isn’t really a surprise— almost 55% of all the internet traffic in the world comes from mobile devices. Ever since the launch of smartphones in the late 2000s, more and more people have switched to mobile devices as their primary internet tool.
This change forced Google to start ranking the websites according to their mobile friendliness as well. The mobile-first indexing makes sure that mobile-friendly websites rank higher in the search results. This is because mobile-friendly websites load faster on mobile devices.
Device Equality is Important As Well
Google also ranks websites according to their device friendliness. This rule means that the content displayed on the desktop version should be the same for mobile devices as well. If the content is changed or displayed less on the mobile devices, then Google will certainly punish the website by reducing their ranking.
If the content is unchanged on all platforms, however, then it will get down to the speed.
What Should You Do To Adapt to This New Ranking System?
If you don’t want to be affected with the new update, then simply make sure that your website is perfectly responsive on all devices. Make sure the speed of the website is not compromised at all. Contact your web hosting company to improve the speed if you feel that it is slow according to today’s standard. Keep up-to-date with Google’s Webmaster Central Blog for all the changes in the policies.
