You are standing in a booth. People are lined up, handing you money in exchange for a small book. This lasts, with little let up, for most of the day. At sundown, you tuck your money in a backpack and head home.
This has been your life for the last two years. Business has been good, so there was no reason to suspect anything would be different the next day.
Except there was.
You show up to your little booth, and wait. Occasionally, a customer trickles in, but otherwise you are alone. Around lunchtime, you peer down the lane. A few stalls seem to have a steady stream of customers. But not many.
You look at the calendar. It is April 21, 2015. You scratch your head and wonder if tomorrow is going to be same.
An odd warning about mobile search
The story above is analogous to how Google’s algorithm updates typically unfold. Website and small business owners wake up one day to find the landscape drastically changed.
Panda and Penguin are the usual examples we like to trot out. In those cases, however, those who were caught up in the convulsions deserved their punishments. It was clear they were violating — at least, pushing the limits of — what Google favored.
But Google’s update to their mobile algorithm is different. We actually got an explicit warning that a change to the algorithm was coming.
This was posted on February 26, 2015:
Starting April 21, we will be expanding our use of mobile-friendliness