ICYMI

Google has announced that starting today; mobile-first Indexing will now be the default for all new websites. What this means is that when a new site is registered, it will be crawled by Google’s smartphone Googlebot, and its mobile-friendly content will be used to index its pages, as well as to understand the site’s structured data and to show snippets from the website in Google’s search results, when relevant.

It’s pretty impressive to witness how the web has evolved from being focused on the desktop to become mobile-friendly, and now to being mostly crawlable and indexable with mobile user-agents. Prior to this development, Google had previously defined those types of sites as ‘unknown’ to Google Search.

This is a welcoming change to the way search works

For the past few years, the primary way people engage in google search is mostly through mobile searches, and this has practically forced Google to take a bold step in encouraging every website owner to make the content of their website mobile-friendly. As it’s customary, Google’s conventional way of indexing and ranking systems has been through the desktop version of a page’s content. It’s all smooth and sleek until Google tries to index and rank a website which has a different desktop and mobile version of the content.

While having a website with different desktop and mobile view is more like a common practice, Google has once shown that it’s totally against it, as it often confuses users and search engines alike. This scenario always causes a problem and thus leads to a poor ranking of websites in google search engine.

While a lot of websites have now started to show the same content to their desktop and mobile users, those that are still yet to do the same should endeavor to do so immediately — since having a mobile-friendly site is one of the ranking factors used by Google.

Not a ranking factor

Please don’t get it twisted, mobile-first indexing is not a ranking factor – it is just merely how Google indexes. Being mobile-friendly is a ranking factor and its entirely different from mobile-first indexing.

As regards what will become of the already existing website, Google wrote: “For older sites, we’ll continue monitoring and evaluating pages for their readiness for mobile-first indexing, and we’ll notify them through Search Console once they’re seen as being ready.”

Website owners can check to see how their sites are being crawled by clicking on the “URL Inspection” tab inside the Google Search Console.

Google also offers a host of documentation on how to make websites work for mobile-first indexing. Google is highly recommending having a responsive and mobile-friendly web design instead of having separate URLs for desktop and mobile sites. Google wrote: “While we continue to support responsive web design, dynamic serving, and separate mobile URLs for mobile websites, we recommend responsive web design for new websites. Because of issues and confusion we’ve seen from separate mobile URLs over the years, both from search engines and users, we recommend using a single URL for both desktop and mobile websites.”

Since the majority of Google users begin their searches from mobile devices, it only makes sense that the mobile versions of the website – and not the desktop pages would be used to deliver the search result to users.

What do you think of this amazing change to the way Google indexes websites?