HAVING ANNOUNCED OVER A YEAR AGO THAT IT WAS EXPERIMENTING WITH MOBILE-FIRST INDEXING, GOOGLE HAS NOW GIVEN US AN INSIGHT ON HOW TO GET YOUR SITE READY FOR MOBILE.
Currently, Google’s crawling, indexing and ranking systems typically look at the desktop version of a page’s content. This may cause issues for mobile searches when that version is vastly different from the mobile version. Mobile-first indexing means that Google will use the mobile version of the content for indexing and ranking. This is to better help users find what they’re looking for.
Web developers will notice a significant increase in crawling by Smartphone Googlebot. They will also notice an increase in the snippets in results and content on the Google cache pages. All these crawls will be from the mobile version of the pages.
Sites that make use of responsive web design and correctly implement dynamic serving (including desktop content and markup) generally don’t have to do anything.
Tips
Google has put together a list of extra tips to help ensure a site is ready for mobile-first indexing:
- Make sure the mobile version of your site also has the important, high-quality content. This includes text, images (with alt-attributes) and videos in the usual crawlable and indexable formats.
- Structured data should be both on the mobile and desktop version of the site. Ensure URLs within the structured data are updated to the mobile version of the mobile pages.
- Metadata should be present on both versions of the site. It provides hints about the content on a page for indexing and serving.
- No changes are necessary for interlinking with separate mobile URLs (m.-dot sites). For sites using separate mobile URLs, keep the existing link rel=canonical and link rel=alternate elements between these versions.
- Check hreflang links on separate mobile URLs. When using link rel=hreflang elements for internationalisation, link between mobile and desktop URLs separately. Your mobile URL’s hreflang elements should point to other language/region versions on other mobile URLs, and same for desktop.
- Ensure the servers hosting the site have enough capacity to handle an increase in potential crawl rate. This doesn’t affect sites that use responsive web design and dynamic serving; only sites where the mobile version is on a separate host.
Google will be evaluating sites independently on their readiness for mobile-first indexing. This will be based on the above criteria and transitioning them when ready. This process has already been rolled out for a handful of sites, which are closely monitored by its search team.
Currently, Google doesn’t have a timeline for when this will be rolled out to all sites. They believe it will slowly help webmasters get their sites ready for mobile users.