How Does Mobile-First Indexing Work, and How Does It Impact On Ranking?

Mobile-first indexing has been the talk of 2018 in the SEO world, and certainly this major shift in how Google search works has left SEOs with questions about what will result.

It’s important, however, when discussing any type of Google update to remember the basics of search indexing and ranking, and this knowledge is especially applicable to mobile-first indexing.

Indexing is the reading and storing of a web page’s information by the search engine indexing robot (in this case, GoogleBot). Once Google visits and reads a page, it stores that information in its index.Ranking is the process where the search engine evaluates the information in its index and determines which web pages match its criteria according to the search query and other factors (such as device). A site cannot be ranked, however, if it is not already indexed. Ranking is like the librarian, providing recommendations based on your criteria.

Remember that ranking and indexing are separate things, each with separate purposes, goals and factors. Just because Google is changing how it indexes, it does not mean that Google is changing how it ranks websites, too.

Now, for both desktop and mobile search results, Google is basing its decisions on the content available to it in its library (the index), which is the shorter-form mobile version. Google’s ranking factors will be applied to this shorter-form version. The shorter-form version may not be as valuable in Google’s estimation, and therefore, your ranking may take a dip.

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