As we approach the April 21st date, the day the mobile-friendly algorithm goes live, webmasters are a bit anxious about getting their web sites mobile-friendly.
At SMX West, I moderated the mobile SEO panel where Google's Gary Illyes presented on. I wish SMX would let me live blog and moderate at the same time because of bunch of important and new nuggets of information came out.
The most important ones I covered yesterday at Search Engine Land with Google: The Mobile-Friendly Ranking Factor Runs In Real-Time & Is On A Page-By-Page Basis.
This is huge because even if a webmaster can't get all his/her pages mobile-friendly by April 21st, Google will go on a page-by-page basis and immediately when they do go mobile-friendly, as soon as Google picks up on it, those pages will benefit from the algorithm.
This mobile-friendly algorithm doesn't seem to be run like Penguin where it is site-wide, impacting the whole entire site. It also doesn't appear to run in spurts or periodically like Penguin or the page-layout algorithm. So even if you do not have the time and resources to get your whole site mobile-friendly by April 21st, you should be able to do the most important pages first and work your way through the rest as soon as you can.
Also, less importantly, Gary said they are working on a separate mobile-friendly index. He said it as if it wasn't a big deal, that someone, somewhere at Google is playing around with the idea of using a separate mobile-friendly index for mobile results. Personally, I don't see it being efficient for Google to run separate indexes. In fact, they consolidated those efforts in the past with the supplemental index a long long time ago. We will see if anything comes of the separate mobile index but I doubt we will hear much of it anytime soon.
Also, the topic of Google using desktop factors and signals for mobile results is still how Google works today but that might change over time with pagespeed and other factors. But as of today, things still work as they work on this topic but may change in the future.
Forum discussion at Cre8asite Forums and Local Search Forums.
Image credit to BigStockPhoto for mobile seo icon
