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