Mobile-first indexing means Google predominantly uses the mobile version of the content for indexing and ranking. Historically, the index primarily used the desktop version of a page's content when evaluating the relevance of a page to a user's query. Since the majority of users now access Google Search with a mobile device, Googlebot primarily crawls and indexes pages with the smartphone agent going forward.
Starting on July 1, 2019, Google will use mobile-first indexing, enabled by default for all new websites (new to the web or previously unknown to Google Search). For older or existing websites, Google will continue to monitor and evaluate pages based on the best practices.
What if I don’t have a mobile-friendly website?
Google said, “If you only have a desktop site, we’ll continue to index your desktop site just fine, even if we’re using a mobile user-agent to view your site.”
If you have a mobile site, then you need to make sure the content and links on the mobile site are similar enough to the desktop version so that Google can consume the proper content and rank your site as well as it did by crawling your desktop site.
Make Sure Your Website is Mobile Friendly
You can check if your website is mobile-friendly by using Google’s Mobile-Friendly Testing Tool.
We have noticed that websites that are not mobile-friendly, have continued to rank where they would have done before in searches on a desktop, though have fallen down the ranks when the same search is done from a mobile device.
Google and other search engines are putting a lot of value in websites that are mobile-friendly, though also looking at speed of a website, where its hosted, SSL certificates and site security.
There are many ways that you can make your website mobile-friendly, if you need any help with your own website please contact us.
Consider Adding AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages):
You can read more about AMP pages here and how to implement them into your website: AMP Project
AMP pages are designed to make your website’s pages load a lot quicker on mobile phones. This project was actually designed by both Google and Twitter to help optimize mobile searches. Essentially, it is a stripped-down form of HTML that still provides necessary design/information, but has less information to load.
There are many ways that you can make your website mobile-friendly, if you need any help with your own website please contact us.
