Google announced at the end of March 2018 that they would begin migrating sites that follow the best practices for mobile-first indexing.
A month later SEOs and webmaster are now starting to receive notifications via the Google Search Console that their sites are being enabled for mobile-first indexing.
So Why Has Google Decided to Change the Way Websites are Indexed?
In the past, Google has typically crawled, indexed and ranked websites based on the desktop version of a page’s content. The reason for the change in indexing is due to the number of mobile users surpassing desktop users.
The shift in indexing is to better provide users with mobile-friendly pages and content to improve their user experience.
What Does the Mobile-First Index Roll Out Mean for Your Website?
This indexing update is unlikely to affect your site as long as you follow these site best practices:
- Images and videos found on a site must be viewable on both desktop and mobile devices.
- Web design must be responsive dependant on the device accessing the site.
- Elements such as buttons on a page should be clickable and interactive for mobile users.
- Web page load speed has been confirmed by Google as a ranking factor on mobile and a recent study shows that 40% of users will leave a page if it takes more than 3 seconds to load.
These tips are only a small number of best practices you can implement to improve your websites mobile friendliness.
Thankfully for now Google offers the Mobile-Friendly-Test which gives you a basic insight into how you can improve your website for mobile users.
