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Comment by unwind | Hacker News Reader

So, am I right in understanding this to mean that Google will change how they rank sites, adding (more?) weight to a site's mobile-friendliness, even if queried from a non-mobile machine?

That doesn't make a lot of sense to me at first, and doesn't seem to be what's necessarily best for users.

If I search for something on my 1920x1200-pixel desktop, I don't want Google to prioritize results that display well (and thus might contain less information) on mobile screens.

So I guess (and hope) I'm wrong, and it's just me reading badly, or poor reporting. :)

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It's explicity limited to mobile search:

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2015/02/finding-m...

> This change will affect mobile searches in all languages worldwide [...]

True.

Though: we speculate that it may eventually come to affect all searches - as mobile-friendliness becomes more pervasive (and hence as non-mobile-friendliness becomes an outlier), we anticipate that they may prefer a good mobile-friendly result to an equivalent non-mobile friendly result even on the desktop.

The main user-centric argument for this is the increasing amount of multi-screening (i.e. returning to the same page on multiple devices) as well as sharing a link via email or social (where the recipient is highly-likely to open it on mobile at least some of the time).

Yup CTR on mobile would help the domain overall.

Google has said (or at least: it has been widely reported) that the impact will be on the mobile results only. That's not to say that will always be true, though.

"On April 21, 2015, Google will release a significant new mobile-friendly ranking algorithm that’s designed to give a boost to mobile-friendly pages in Google’s mobile search results."

http://searchengineland.com/library/google/google-mobile-fri...

I heard it will only affect rankings when searched from a mobile device. This excludes tablets and desktop class devices.

In effect a business has a choice to make, do they want to be down ranked on 50% of searches because they choose not to give a good experience to the devices doing the search.

Isn't a tablet a mobile device ?

Google decided a while ago that user search behavior on tablet is more similar to desktop than mobile...that's why in AdWords mobile is a separate bid modifier but your desktop targeting cannot be seperated from tablet.

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