Earlier this year, Google announced that it would be rolling out a new “mobile first” function into its search engine. This changes not only how websites are indexed, but can also impact how they are ranked. Here we’ll take a closer look at what mobile first indexing does, how it works, and what it might mean for your future web search results or website rankings.
What is mobile first indexing?
Mobile first indexing is exactly as it sounds—Google now catalogues the mobile version of a website in its index first, and also uses it as the baseline for how it determines that website’s ranking.
Up until now, Google only used a desktop version of a website to index and rank its different pages, with the mobile version being considered the alternate version of a website.
However, it’s important to note that the new function isn’t called mobile only. If your company doesn’t have a mobile friendly website, it will still be included in Google’s index. However, that lack of mobile friendliness will likely affect your site’s position in the rankings in one way or another.
How does it work?
As mentioned above, the process of migrating sites that follow the best practices for mobile users first started in March. This was to better help Google’s increasingly mobile user base better find what it is they were looking for.
Google determines whether your site’s content is mobile friendly by using a series of barometers, or criteria.
The first criteria is whether or not your website’s design is responsive. This can come in a variety of forms, but most notably for mobile devices, it’s whether or not a site adjusts to a smartphone or tablet’s screen size. The second barometer is based on your website’s dynamic serving, which is a its ability to serve different content according to the user’s device.
Websites that meet such criteria are automatically notified by Google’s Search Console, where the site owner is then directed to a smartphone Googlebot, where he or she can see the website’s significantly increased crawl rate.
What does this mean for web search results?
If you have a website and haven’t been notified by Google, you needn’t panic; it may just be that your site wasn’t in the first wave of indexing. It’s also important to remember that content gathered by Google’s mobile first indexing has no ranking advantage over other content. Moreover, websites that still only have desktop content will continue to be represented in Google’s index.
Having said that, Google will continue to encourage websites to make their content optimised for mobile use. Google first did this in 2015, with an algorithm update that meant that mobile friendly content would perform better in mobile rankings. Then in 2018, Google announced that slow-loading content would perform worse in desktop and mobile search rankings.
Now that you know how mobile first indexing might impact you, it’s time to make sure that the websites you own or manage are mobile friendly. See how your sites’ different pages look on different mobile devices, and fix any issues now.
If you’d like to find out more about search engines or Essex seo specifically, you can visit the Absolute Digital Media website or contact one of their expert team in the UK at 01245 287 864.
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This story’s trending topics: Google mobile first indexing, Google Search, Google indexing, website indexing, website ranking, search engines, search engine optimization, SEO, UK SEO
