Google starting to enforce mobile-friendly web design as a search ranking factor This week the traffic to one of my sites is exhibiting a steep traffic fall-off. For years it has had a solid 1000 visitors per day, or so, and at the beginning of March the traffic started to slowly diminish, then on Wednesday April 3 the traffic fell off steeply. Usually this site has a fall-off on the weekends, so this particular change is ominous. In the Google Webmasters tools is a clue - that at the beginning of March there is suddenly many reports of mobile usability issues. The two are likely connected as Google has long warned of a plan to downgrade sites that are not mobile friendly.

Intermediate result fixing mobile usability problems after Google enforced mobile-friendly web design as a search ranking factor Last week I saw an ominous drop in traffic on one of my sites that was related to Google starting to enforce mobile-friendly web design on the site. Google has long warned it would start looking at mobile-responsiveness and use it as a ranking factor in search results. My site wasn't too bad in this regard, but some of the pages were outright horrible on mobile devices. Not all pages, only some. I've spent most of the last week working on the issues, and have an intermediate result to show.