On Friday, Dr. Pete Meyers, the man behind Mozcast said on Twitter that his tool picked up significant ranking changes in the mobile search results. He said "URLs on page one jumped from 80.9% to 88.7%." That is very big but within 24 hours, everything went back to normal he said the day after.
In our data set, "mobile-friendly" URLs on page 1 jumped from 80.9% to 88.7%. More signs lately of desktop/mobile divergence.
— Dr. Pete Meyers (@dr_pete) February 5, 2016
No idea what happened, but "mobile-friendly" URLs are back down to about 81%. Possible algo test yesterday, but no sure.
— Dr. Pete Meyers (@dr_pete) February 6, 2016
Now, Krystian Szastok is reporting a similar change from AccuRanker in the Google mobile results today. He said, "we've seen a huge increase in ranking fluctuations, but only on mobile on Google Grump, our SERP monitoring tool."
@rustybrick Hi Barry, we've seen some huge movement in Google US and UK mobile only: https://t.co/BwGmT8dgMo
— Krystian Szastok (@krystianszastok) February 9, 2016
The truth is, I am not seeing any of much webmaster chatter about this but again, it is mobile only plus it might be something Google is testing on and off.
Maybe it is AMP tests? Maybe it is upping the mobile friendly algorithm? Maybe it is a new spam filter around mobile redirects? Or maybe it is nothing.
Have you noticed anything here?
Forum discussion at Twitter & Twitter.
Update: Pete from Moz updated us this morning that even more changes in mobile spotted last night:
@krystianszastok @rustybrick Massive mobile temps last night, and "mobile-friendly" URLs hit 97% (from 81%). Still digging in.
— Dr. Pete Meyers (@dr_pete) February 9, 2016
Update 2: I asked Gary Illyes from Google and he said he isn't aware of anything but it doesn't mean nothing is happening. Here are the tweets:
@rustybrick nothing I'm aware of. Email press?
— Gary Illyes (@methode) February 9, 2016
