Heads up! Mobile First Indexing is arriving in the coming weeks.
What does that mean? It means that the mobile version of your website becomes the starting point for what Google includes in their index, and the baseline for how they determine rankings.
If your site doesn’t have a mobile-friendly version, the desktop site can still be included in the index. But the lack of a mobile-friendly experience could impact negatively on the rankings of your site. A site with a better mobile experience
would potentially receive a rankings boost even for searchers on a desktop.
The mobile version will be considered the primary version of your website. So if your mobile and desktop versions are equivalent — for instance if you’ve optimized your content for mobile, and/or if you use responsive design — this change
should not have any significant impact in terms of your site’s performance in search results.
But it does represent a fundamental reversal in the way Google is thinking about your website content and how to prioritize crawling and indexation. Remember that up until now the desktop site was considered the primary version and the mobile site was treated as an “alternate” version.
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Now Google might not even make the effort to crawl and cache the mobile versions of all of these pages, as they could simply display that mobile URL to mobile searchers.
In A Nutshell:
- Mobile First Indexing is arriving in the coming weeks
- Google will notify you via Google Search Console when your site is reviewed via this indexing
- Google will still have only index for search
- It will look first at your mobile website and try and use this content to determine ranking
- If you don’t have a mobile website, it will move onto your desktop website
- If you have two websites (desktop and mobile), it will look at mobile
- If your website is mobile responsive you most likely have nothing to worry about
- If your website is only desktop, then you might see a decrease in ranking
- If the mobile version of your website hides a lot of content and provides a limited user experience, you should rethink this approach
- You can test your website for mobile at https://search.google.com/test/mobile-friendly
Learn More:
https://developers.google.com/search/mobile-sites/
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