GOOGLE ROLLS OUT MOBILE FIRST INDEXING

Google continues with its commitment to prioritize mobile navigation and has announced that mobile versions of websites will be placed in the first places of the search engine.

Thus, Google has begun to migrate some “sites that follow the best practices for mobile first indexing,” as announced on its developer blog.

With this, Google will try to make sure that users can find what they are looking for when making their searches, mainly from mobile devices. This change comes after a year and a half of “careful” experimentation and testing.

So far, Google has been using its tracking, indexing and ranking systems based on desktop web versions, but there are cases where there are apparent differences between what is offered on desktop devices and mobile devices.

The reason for Mobile First Indexing version of websites is because it has been known that mobile devices are mostly now used when watching videos, searching, among other actions compared to desktop computers.

Google says it will continue to have a single index to show search results, so there is no separate index specific to mobile devices. The chosen websites will be notified through the Google Search Console.

Also, Google urges the rest website owners with a mobile version not to worry if they are not part of this new method of content collection, which will not affect the classification of websites, as they claim. Those websites that do not have mobile versions will still be in the index.

Mobile First Indexing – How it Works

As always, Google makes available to all interested parties all the necessary documentation to know how this new method of indexing works and some of the critical points on the documentation page webmasters need to take into considerations are:

1. Site owners with a separate desktop and mobile content should update the version of their website which has lesser content so it will tally with the primary website version.

2. Metadata should be equivalent on both versions of your site

3. Ensure that URLs in the structured data on the mobile versions are updated to the mobile URL. Also check the data highlighter dashboard regularly for extraction errors if you use if you use data highlighter to provide structured URL.

4. Ensure your servers have enough capacity to handle the potential increase in crawl rate on the mobile version of your site.

5. To make sure you have access to data and messages for both versions, you need to verify both versions of your site using the search console.
(NB: Your site may experience data shift when Google switches to mobile-first indexing for your site.)

In the aspect of websites ranking, Google says they may show users content that is not mobile-friendly or content that is slow in loading if it’s many other signals determine it is the most relevant content to display.
Google promised to monitor this new change carefully. And just in case you encounter any problem or have questions, you can reach out to us at AVX Digital. We’ll help turn your site into a mobile friendly site.