Mobilegeddon is out of the way and hopefully you survived. Anyone hit by the mobile-friendly algorithm change can’t say they didn’t see it coming. For months, Google had warned that the change was going to be made to reward sites that are mobile-friendly, while punishing those that aren’t. Google began rolling out the change on April 21, 2015, and almost a month later, few websites have seen a significant difference in their site traffic. That is, few websites with the exception of HubPages.
Paul Edmondson, CEO and founder of HubPages, recently reported a 22% drop in its search traffic. Edmondson told CNBC that he does not believe it is associated with Mobilegeddon as it took place on May 3rd, more than a week after the mobile-friendly algorithm update.
This is not the first run-in that HubPages has had with Google. In 2011, the site saw a significant decrease in visitors after Google rolled out its first major update to its Panda Algorithm. Google saw a huge increase in advertising revenue thanks to cleaning up search results and filtering out lower-quality pages. However, sites such as HubPages and eHow took a big hit.
While Google has not made an official announcement on any algorithm update since Mobilegeddon, some in the industry have said that Google has “all but” disclosed an update. So, we will have to wait and see if HubPages’ traffic was the result of its own SEO or a forthcoming announcement from Google.
