Google: Get mobile friendly by 4-21-15 or else!

Google has announced that starting April 21st, 2015 if your site doesn't meet their criteria for mobile friendly usability, it will "Significantly impact your search results". While they never come out and say what "significantly impact" means, our assumption is that they will put all of the sites that rank well for the keyword phrase, that ARE mobile friendly, ahead of yours. 

Sometime ago they announced that they were tagging mobile friendly sites and highlighting them in the search results. It looked something like this...

It's too soon to tell, but I suspect that this indicator may go away and Google will simply position Mobile-friendly sites, at the top of the results.

Google is currently sending a message like the one below to webmasters who have registered their site through the Google Wembaster Tools site...

To: webmaster of http://www.yourwebsite.com/  Google systems have tested all of your pages from your site and found that 100% of them have critical mobile usability errors. The errors on these 108 pages severely affect how mobile users are able to experience your website. These pages will not be seen as mobile-friendly by Google Search, and will therefore be displayed and ranked appropriately for smartphone users.  

So, if you don't currently have a mobile-friendly site, what should you do? Our advice is simple, redesign your site NOW, and use responsive web design to do it. Here's a whole page on what responsive web design is, and another page here, of some of our favorite sites we've used responsive mobile design on.

All I can say about Google's decision is, I told you so. This has been coming for some time and we've been standing on our soap box saying redesign using responsive now.