Mobilegeddon

Mobilegeddon is a name for Google's search engine algorithm update of April 21, 2015.¹ The term was coined by Chuck Price in a post written for Search Engine Watch on March 9, 2015. The term was then adopted by webmasters and web-developers.

The main effect of this update was to give priority to websites that display well on smartphones and other mobile devices. The change did not affect searches made from a desktop computer or a laptop.²

Google announced its intention to make the change in February 2015.³ In addition to their announcement, Google published an article, "Mobile Friendly Sites," on their Google Developers page to help webmasters with the transition.⁴ Google claims the transition to mobile-friendly sites was to improve user experience, stating "the desktop version of a site might be difficult to view and use on a mobile device."⁴

The protologism is a blend word of "mobile" and "Armageddon" because the change "could cause massive disruption to page rankings."⁵ But, writing for Forbes, Robert Hof says that concerns about the change were "overblown" in part because "Google is providing a test to see if sites look good on smartphones".⁶

Search engine results pages on smartphones now show URLs in "breadcrumb" format, as opposed to the previous explicit format.⁷

Based on their data set, software company Searchmetrics found that the average loss of rankings for the non-mobile friendly sites measured was 0.21 positions on average.⁸ Content marketing company BrightEdge has tracked over 20,000 URLs since the update, and is reporting a 21% decrease in non-mobile-friendly URLs on the first 3 pages of search results.⁹ According to Peter J. Meyers, it was "nothing to write home about."¹⁰