New Google Update: Mobile-First Indexing Starts Now

Google has now focused its complete attention on mobile as it has begun testing its Mobile-First Indexing.

But first, what is Mobile-First Indexing?

Traditionally, Google crawls the desktop version of a web page and later indexes them for both desktop and mobile ranking.

But according to the newest update, Google will now primarily look at the mobile version of your website for its ranking signals. However, in the absence of the mobile version, Google will index the desktop version.

Google has always stated that they witness more mobile searches than desktop searches on a daily basis. But due to the indexing based on desktop versions, there were some issues with this traditional practice.

”This can cause issues when the mobile page has less content than the desktop page because our algorithms are not evaluating the actual page that is seen by a mobile searcher.”

Now, the Google Algorithm will primarily use the mobile version of the site’s content to determine ranking, understand structured data and show snippets from those pages in the results.

Google aims to provide the best user experience on both desktop and mobile.

Google’s Recommendations for Mobile-first Indexing

Though the Mobile-first indexing has started out small, Google is focused on ramping up the experiment on a larger-scale once they are confident that they have delivered on great user experience for everyone.

Here are a few tips to help you keep up with this change:

o  If you have a responsive website, where the primary content is same across mobile and desktop versions, then you needn’t change anything.

o  However, if you have two different versions for mobile and desktop, you need to make certain changes:

·        Make sure to serve the structured markup for both desktop and mobile versions. You can verify the equivalence of both the desktop and mobile markup by entering the URLs of both the versions in the Structured Data Testing Tool and comparing the results.

·        Avoid using a large amount of irrelevant information while adding the mobile markup.

·        In case of canonical URLs, sites don’t have to make any changes.

·        Ensure that your mobile version is accessible to the Googlebot. Use the robots.txt Testing tool to verify this.

o  If your desktop version is only verified on the Search console, you need to add and verify your mobile version as well.

If you do not own a mobile version of your site, you needn’t worry as Google will index your desktop version of the site.

Get ready for the Mobile-first indexing change. In the meanwhile, stay tuned for more Google Updates.