Mobile First Indexing Officially Rolling Out: What You Need to Know

Google has just announced that the Mobile First indexing is officially rolling out. What is Mobile First and why should you care? Well, traditionally Google has based their crawling, indexing, and ranking on the desktop or laptop version of your web site. But now, that’s changing. And it’s going to have an effect on your web site, it’s rankings, and your web site traffic. Here’s what you need to know.

• Google has based their crawling, indexing, and ranking on the desktop version in the past. Now, they will use the mobile version of the page for indexing and ranking.
• You need to make sure that the mobile version of your web site works right. View it in a mobile phone. Make sure users can find, read, and get what they need.
• If you haven’t moved your web site to a responsive design or have a separate mobile version, well, now is the time to do that.
• There is only one index. In the past that has been the desktop version that they index. But now, that’s going to change–they will be using the mobile version primarily.
• Once your web site has been enabled to the Mobile First index, you’ll be notified in Google Search Console. See an example below:

  

• You will see increased crawling activity from the Smartphone Googlebot user agent.
• Google will show the mobile version of your page in the search results and in the cached version.

Well, since this is, technically being announced today, we could call this Mobilegeddon III or “Mobilegeddon 3”, a phrase that I know certain Google engineers don’t like (ahem). But, you don’t need to be scared or freak out about this change. I’d only start to begin to freak out if you don’t have a mobile version of your site, you’re still using an old outdated version of your site that was built back in the 1990s or early 2000s that doesn’t look good on a mobile device. If that’s you, give me a call–I’d be glad to help and steer you in the right direction.