What is 'mobile first' indexing?

Google sees a shift from desktop computers to mobile devices. Most people search Google using a mobile device. Until now, Google's ranking algorithms primarily looked at the desktop version of a web page.

This can cause issues when the mobile page shows less content than the desktop page that was evaluated by Google's algorithms.

For that reason, Google plans to primarily use the mobile version of a site's content to rank pages. The search results will still be available for both desktop and mobile devices. However, the focus will be on mobile.

When will Google start with 'mobile first' indexing?

Google has already started. They have 'begun experiments to make [Google's] index mobile-first.' Google's knows that this is a major change:

"We understand this is an important shift in our indexing and it’s one we take seriously. We’ll continue to carefully experiment over the coming months on a small scale and we’ll ramp up this change when we’re confident that we have a great user experience."

What do you have to do now?

It is clear that Google is serious about building a mobile-first index. For that reason, you should make sure that your web pages can be indexed correctly:

1. Use responsive website design

If you have a responsive website or a dynamic serving website where the content and markup is the same on mobile and desktop, you do not have to change anything.

2. Consider changes, if you do not use responsive website design

If you have a site configuration where the primary content and markup is different across mobile and desktop, you should consider making some changes to your site:

• Make sure to serve structured markup for both the desktop and mobile version.
• Use the robots.txt testing tool to verify that your mobile version is accessible to Googlebot.
• If you have only verified your desktop site in Search Console, add and verify your mobile version.

If you only have a desktop site, Google will continue to index your desktop site. However, you won’t benefit from the mobile-friendly ranking boost then.

When building a mobile version of your website, keep in mind that a functional desktop-oriented site can be better than a broken or incomplete mobile version of the site. It's better for you to build up your mobile site and launch it when ready. Do not rush.

The Top 10 Optimizer in SEOprofiler helps you to optimize your web pages for high rankings on Google Mobile. The Ranking Monitor in SEOprofiler can check the rankings of your web pages in Google's mobile search results. If you haven't done it yet, try SEOprofiler now.

Article by Axandra
SEO software