During the Search Marketing Summit today (June 1) Google’s Gary Illyes has said that Google will be updating the page speed ranking factor to look specifically at the page speed of your mobile pages when it comes to the mobile-friendly algorithm.
Jennifer Slegg wrote a report saying Gary Illyes mentioned this update is months away from happening, and not years.
A number of the ranking signals that Google utilizes today for mobile rankings are based on your desktop web pages, and not mobile web pages. What this boils down to is, if you have a fast desktop web page, but you have slow mobile version of the site, your mobile rankings won’t be hurt.
One Google’s mobile-friendly algorithm gets updated, they hope to add mobile-specific page speed as a factor, so they don’t have to rely on the desktop version.
Back in April of 2010, page speed became a ranking factor, and three years later, in June 2013, it was hinted by Matt Cutts that a negative factor would come to slow mobile pages. Fast forward to a year ago, Gary Illyes mentioned that they were working on mobile-specific page speed. It seems that now, this is just months away.
But something we should keep in mind is that, according to Gary on Twitter, it’s still in the planning phase. So if this is still only months away, we’ll just have to wait and see.
@jenstar as I said, we’re still in the planning phase so I can’t give you a concrete answer. Aim for the highest @eYordanov
— Gary Illyes (@methode) June 1, 2016