In a decision that some have expected for some time, Google has decided to experiment with Mobile first indexing which will lead to the eventual permanence of indexing with Mobile websites first. As we have reported recently, 75% of internet searches will be by mobile by 2017. This change in Google’s policy is only a reflection of practicality as mobile usage will continue to dominate internet searches with the advent of smartphone, tablets and other mobile devices.
So what does this switch mean to the SEO professional or business owner revising their own sites? Google will now index mobile content first and use the information derived in the main factor on how to rank its results. This is irrespective of whether you’re on desktop or mobile. Also, if you’re not mobile-friendly initially, that will have an impact even on how you appear for desktop searchers.
Google has said that if you do not have a mobile site that it is fine but they will rank your site only according to your desktop version. That means at the end of the day you will not get the benefit of having mobile but they will crawl your site just like how they have been in the past.
Here are some recommendations that Google has offered in order to prepare for the mobile shift:
“If you have a responsive site or a dynamic serving site where the primary content and markup is equivalent across mobile and desktop, you shouldn’t have to change anything.If you have a site configuration where the primary content and markup is different across mobile and desktop, you should consider making some changes to your site.
- Make sure to serve structured markup for both the desktop and mobile version.Sites can verify the equivalence of their structured markup across desktop and mobile by typing the URLs of both versions into the Structured Data Testing Tool and comparing the output.When adding structured data to a mobile site, avoid adding large amounts of markup that isn’t relevant to the specific information content of each document.
- Use the robots.txt testing tool to verify that your mobile version is accessible to Googlebot.
- Sites do not have to make changes to their canonical links; we’ll continue to use these links as guides to serve the appropriate results to a user searching on desktop or mobile.”
For the complete announcement you can read it here. It is not clear when Google will make the change and they will make an announcement in the Webmasters Central Blog when the time is upon us. Until then, it is a prudent idea to use Google’s recommendations and prepare for the changes as it is uncertain how it will affect SEO projects in the future.
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