LOS ANGELES — Google has announced the beginning of its rollout of mobile-first indexing for sites listed in its market-leading search directory.
According to the company, the move follows a-year-and-a-half of careful experimentation and testing.
Google software engineer Fan Zhang explains that its crawling, indexing and ranking systems typically used the desktop version of a page’s content, noting this may cause issues for mobile searchers when that version is vastly different from the mobile version.
“Mobile-first indexing means that we’ll use the mobile version of the page for indexing and ranking, to better help our — primarily mobile — users find what they’re looking for,” Zhang wrote on Google’s Webmaster Central Blog. “We continue to have one single index that we use for serving search results.”
Zhang reveals there is no “mobile-first index,” there is only one main index, making the message clear for webmasters: “mobile-friendly” isn’t good enough anymore — mobile-first is what is required if you wish to maximize the amount of search traffic a site receives from Google.
Among the changes site owners can expect to see are increased crawls by the Smartphone Googlebot and the display of their site’s mobile appearance in search results, with notifications via Search Console as their site’s listings are updated.
Zhang is quick to dissuade panic, however, explaining that mobile-first indexing is about how Google gathers content, not about how content is ranked.
“Content gathered by mobile-first indexing has no ranking advantage over mobile content that’s not yet gathered this way or desktop content. Moreover, if you only have desktop content, you will continue to be represented in our index,” Zhang writes. “Having said that, we continue to encourage webmasters to make their content mobile-friendly.”
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