As some of our customers know from our frantic calling of about 270 customers between Friday afternoon and Saturday night; Google has some new expectations and is starting to penalize websites that do not live up to these expectations.

Almost a year ago, Google warned that they would start using the ability to encrypt your website with a trusted certificate as a ranking signal [1] [2]. But lately Google has been getting more and more aggressive, silently. While there is no blog post or no way of Google communicating this to the professionals, we all know it by simply making a search and observing all of the “top results” being SSL websites. If that’s not enough influence in the way the internet operates, the search engine giant is making yet another demand: Mobile Friendly Sites [3].

Before we get into any confusion of this, lets talk about what exactly Google stated and why what you may be assuming (that you must have a mobile-friendly site) is just not a great assumption. Google stated that mobile friendly websites will be ranked higher on mobile searches. This means, if your website or company isn’t really geared towards a mobile phone — such as a website that deals in games for the PC, then you likely don’t have to worry about this much. But if you’re worried about a customer finding your company while at WalMart looking for their favorite item, your assumption in that your site needs to be mobile friendly is dead accurate.

What websites needs to be mobile friendly? We thought about this very hard, as we said above, if your website intends to exclusively support PC, then you have no need for a mobile friendly site. Some other companies that would remain, for the most part, unaffected, would be realtors. To understand this you need to understand human psychology. For instance, if I’m searching for a house, I understand this is a very important life decision and my research will be thorough. This is not a decision I’m going to make at WalMart, or the local diner — I’m going to make this decision behind a desk, whether it be my desk or a realtor’s desk. New car dealers are likely in this boat as well, especially higher-end brands. However used car dealers would be polar opposite, in fact your sites would likely be viewed by customers who are at the big brand dealer’s car-lot looking for a lower, used price.

In summary, it will greatly depend on the shopping habits of your customers — do they mostly visit you from mobile phones or from a PC? And do you have enough mobile traffic to warrant re-designing your site to mobile-friendly? We’ll leave this for each website owner to decide for him/herself. However, one thing is for certain, Google’s heavy-handed influence of the way the internet is evolving is very real and you should take note of that and keep a sharp eye on our blog for future posts on the topic.