Mobile-first index – all you need to know

More and more people are browsing web via their mobile devices, rather than on a PC or a laptop. Google wants to catch up with this trend implementing mobile-first index. It´s an experiment to approach more users and to offer them primarily mobile versions of the webpages.

Mobile-first index and crawling

For crawling, Google will primarily use mobile versions of webs. It means that when crawling new URLs and further analyzing, indexing and including them in search, Google Bot will use mobile version of your site.Not sure about how crawling works? Read more in one of our older blogs!Until recently, desktop version has been used for both, mobile and desktop searches, after which a mobile ranking was launched, that favorized mobile versions of webs.Now, the mobile version of web will be used for indexing for both, mobile and desktop searches.

One or two indexes?

It is important to mention that Google brings this new indexing into life without any bigger comments, and also that it is an experiment. The users have received some notifications, but we do not know how this process will go on.During the transition, Google will use both indexes, while a group of users will only receive the results based on mobile-first indexing.If the transition will be successful, Google will keep only the mobile-first index.

What does it mean to you?

If you do not have a mobile version of your web, you do not have to stress out. Google will use the desktop version for the indexing and ranking instead.The problem may appear if you have a mobile version, but that is of worse quality than the desktop one. That means that you can have less content there, or it is not optimized well for mobile devices. You should consider its remake then. In our following blog we will explain you how to do that.Another response is responsive web design that automatically adjusts for the devices the webpage is being viewed on. By resizing, shrinking, enlarging and so forth.Google is taking this step cautiously and therefore we cannot predict any impacts on the web owners. We will certainly keep you updated on any news!

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About the Author: Simona Pavelkova

Account Manager and aspiring PPC specialist at BlueWinston. I like to learn about newest information about ecommerce business and Google Ads.