For many, the Google mobile friendly algorithm was a let down. It is fully rolled out but many still don’t see any significant impact, nothing at the scale of Panda or Penguin from the SEO/webmaster point of view.

Google’s John Mueller was asked this by a webmaster (I think wearing a bathrobe) this morning at the 12:20 minute mark. The question was basically;

What is going on with this mobile update? Basically, why hasn’t there been as much of an impact as Google or the industry has lead off. It didn’t have that much of an impact. Why?

John answered that in two fold, one being that it was a very wide change and that for some niche queries, you wouldn’t see the impact because they are already mobile friendly and second being that more sites went mobile friendly than Google expected.

Here is the first part of the transcript of John’s answer:

John then went on to explain he/Google was surprised by the number of sites that did go mobile friendly and that over time it might make sense to dial up the mobile friendly algorithm more. Include more things like speed and interstitials, and maybe more things. The second part echos what Gary Illyes said the other day.

Here is the video, worth a watch:

Forum discussion at Google+.