Mobile-first indexing has been attracting the attention of SEO professionals for the past two years, and the debate among experts has intensified as Google slowly makes moves to make the site more mobile-friendly.
Mobile-first indexing marks a big change in Google’s guidelines for SEO professionals and website owners. This has raised many questions for site owners and experts. What will be the effects of mobile-first indexing? How will it change search indexing and site ranking?
To get a clear idea of what Google is trying to achieve, you must first understand the indexing and ranking process
Indexing and ranking
I’ll try to be as simple as possible. So when you index your website, your website goes through the search engine crawler to read and store the information on your website. Basically, a search engine stores all the information about your website in its index, like a library.
Now when you compare ranking with indexing, it is the process after the website is fully indexed. This is where the search engine uses the information it has stored in its index about your website to rank you in the search results pages. The search engine will rank you based on the quality and relevance of your content to your search queries.
In short, indexing is the foundation without which evaluation cannot do.
Mobile indexing
Mobile-first indexing is exactly what it says, it is indexing. It’s just a change in Google’s indexing policy, although it’s a major shift where your mobile site will be prioritized for indexing. This doesn’t mean that your desktop version will be completely ignored, but it will no longer be the primary version of your site.
This probably won’t affect your site because your site will be indexed for the mobile version first. The problem can only occur if your mobile version is not on top with your desktop version, if there is less content on the mobile version, or if there are no videos and images in the mobile version, it can hurt your ranking.
Why is Google moving to mobile-first indexing?
It’s a no-brainer because with ever-increasing mobile traffic, Google’s attention had to turn to this. Most of the internet surfers are mobile users, if you monitor your website traffic, you will see mostly traffic from smart Googlebot. It was inevitable that Google would force website owners to switch to mobile versions of their websites.
So what happens now?
No need to worry about it, I’ll tell you why. First of all, Google is in the testing phase of this process and is moving about it quite slowly and cautiously, only sites that Google deems ready for this change are given this pill to swallow
Second, it won’t affect your business and rankings much if you have a responsive version live, given that the site speed is fast and equivalent to the desktop version. If that’s the case, you probably don’t need to worry.
Keep your mobile site optimized and up to the task.
What should one do with their mobile site?
If you have a must-have mobile version of your website, there are some things you need to watch out for.
- Make sure your website has the same or similar high quality content with the same information and keywords. Remember, if you have images or videos in the desktop version, they must also be in the mobile version. It’s all about providing a complete experience to the consumer.
- The same goes for your site’s meta titles and description, keep them identical or similar to your desktop version.
- Make sure your desktop social buttons are also present on the mobile version of your site.
- Also, keep in mind that all sitemap links for your desktop site are present in the mobile version
- The structured data must be the same for both mobile and desktop versions of your website, just don’t add any irrelevant information to the structured data.
What if my mobile version is not responsive or I don’t have a mobile version for my website.
First of all, you need to understand that your desktop version’s rating will not stop because there is still a very significant number of users who are using the desktop versions. However, if the mobile version of your site is not responsive, you will suffer for rankings. Not that you’re stuck, they’ll be dropped from the rankings, but sites with responsive and mobile-equivalent sites will be given more priority.
If you don’t have the mobile version yet, I suggest you get it. Google already forces website owners to have a mobile responsive website and this has become a major ranking factor. So if you don’t have one right now, you’re still suffering in your website rankings. By not having a mobile responsive website you will get on the priority list, websites with a mobile version will be prioritized.
So will google use the mobile version to rank my site?
Basically, Google will index your mobile version first, which means that Google will make the mobile version of your website the primary version, as I mentioned earlier. Keep in mind that your desktop version will still have value, especially if you only have the desktop version, where I would recommend getting a responsive mobile version.
The only thing is that the search results will be different when you search on desktop and when you search on mobile. But that doesn’t mean you’re overlooking the desktop version. You will have to work equally hard on both versions.
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