What does Google mobile-first indexing mean for your website? | Need-to-know
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Google has recently announced that it has begun rolling out mobile-first indexing to certain websites.
Traditionally, Google has always indexed the desktop version of a website and shown this in the search results.
However, if Google migrates a website to mobile-first indexing, then the mobile version of the website will be crawled and displayed in the search results instead.
You can check if your website has been chosen for mobile-first indexing via Search Console. If your website has been migrated, then you’ll see a notification from Google there.
If your website hasn’t been chosen for mobile-first indexing yet, don’t panic. Google is rolling it out gradually so it will take some time before it affects everyone.
So what does this mean for your rankings?
Whether or not a website has been chosen to be migrated to mobile-first indexing doesn’t affect its rankings. Simply being crawled by the mobile-first bot doesn’t increase a website’s position in Google's rankings.
However, as Google will index your mobile site and use the information it gets from there to determine the results it serves, the state of your mobile website will affect your rankings.
If your website is mobile-friendly, then it stands a better chance of ranking more highly than a website that has similar content but is not optimised for mobile.
And what if you don’t have a mobile-friendly site?
It’s a mobile-first, not mobile-only, index so if you only have a desktop version of your website, you won’t suddenly drop out of the search rankings altogether. However, it’s likely that you will see a negative change in rankings, especially if your competitors decide to start optimising their websites for mobile users.
So even if the majority of your traffic still comes from desktop, as is the case in some industries with a lot of technical content, now is the time to invest in a mobile-friendly version too.
With this in mind, webmasters are being encouraged to make their websites as mobile-friendly as possible.
One of the best ways to do this is by having a responsive website that adjusts to the user’s screen size.
Another possibility is to offer the dynamic serving of content, where your website serves different content to users based on their device.
If you decide to go with dynamic serving, or if you have separate URLs for the mobile and desktop versions of your website, then it is important that you ensure that your mobile website contains all the information that you want your users – and the search engines – to see, as it will only be your mobile content which is indexed.
Google advises that your mobile website should have the same content as your desktop website, and that structured data and meta data are present on both versions of your website.
Other tips for building a mobile-friendly website include: not using Flash, setting your viewport correctly, making sure the font size is large enough to read, and making sure your buttons are not too close together.
It is also important to ensure that your mobile website loads quickly.
Do you have any other mobile optimisation tips? Let us know in the comments!