Google has been working and testing on this mobile-first index which will primarily focus on the mobile version of all your websites for its rankings. In case, the mobile version of the website is not available then it will refer back to the desktop version. Although Google had been working on this idea for almost a year but they have announced its details for the first time on their blog.
Majority of Google searches are triggered by mobile; but index is desktop
The company explained that Google witnesses more mobile searches on a regular basis. However whenever a page’s ranking is evaluated, Google refers to the desktop version of the website. This concern was pointed out a year back but Google is fixing it now by digging through the content, link and structured data of the mobile version of every website.
According to Google Blog:
“To make our results more useful, we’ve begun experiments to make our index mobile-first. Although our search index will continue to be a single index of websites and apps, our algorithms will eventually primarily use the mobile version of a site’s content to rank pages from that site, to understand structured data, and to show snippets from those pages in our results. Of course, while our index will be built from mobile documents, we’re going to continue to build a great search experience for all users, whether they come from mobile or desktop devices”
The current task at hand is to index mobile content and then rank those results based on that data irrespective of whether it is a desktop or a mobile. There will no longer be any adjustment rather it will be changed completely. Therefore, those users which are not comfortable using mobile phone, it will affect their overall desktop searches.
Google has started its testing and states, “continue to carefully experiment over the coming months on a small scale, we will “ramp up this change when we’re confident that we have a great user experience.”
Those who do not have a mobile version of the website don’t need to worry regarding the ranking as Google will simply use the desktop version to rank every website.
As per Google blog:
“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”
This statement suggests that if your website is flexible and dynamic with changing content then you don’t need to fret regarding the new change. Nonetheless, if your website doesn’t have the mobile content then you won’t reap the benefits of the ranking boost that will come from mobile friendly sites.
Recommendations from Google for webmasters
According to the technology giant if your website is already responsive where the returns (markup) and content are equal for mobile and desktop, you shouldn’t make any major changes.
However, if you have a website where the markup and the primary content is different across all mobile and desktop, than the following changes need to be made:
1. Ensure to make structured markup for both version (mobile and desktop), site can verify the equality of markup for mobile and desktop by putting URLs of both versions into structured date testing tool and compare the results
2. Be careful not to add structured data to a mobile site to avoid large amount of markup which is not relevant to specific content of every document.
3. In order to verify that your mobile type is accessible to Googlebot, make sure to use the robots.txt testing tool
4. Websites will not have to change their canonical links; as Google will continue to use these links to provide guideline to get the right results to every user
If you own a website who has already verified your desktop version in search box, we recommend you to also verify your mobile version of the website.
Source: SearchEngineLand / Featured image: Kashin / Shutterstock.com
