Google moves to mobile-first indexing

Google has always indexed websites based on the desktop version. But over the past year and a half, Google has been carefully experimenting with and testing the migration of websites that follow best practice over to mobile-first indexing.

Let me clear something up, because it's easy to get confused: mobile first and mobile-first indexing mean two different things. Mobile-first is a term that's been around for some years now and refers to the principle of designing and building websites whose visual and navigation experience is geared towards mobile devices first, and only then towards desktop.

Mobile-first indexing, on the other hand, is Google's response to the fact that more people now visit websites on a mobile device than on desktop. The mobile version of a website will therefore take precedence when it comes to indexing in its search engine. It also happens — and it's far from rare — that someone searches the web on a mobile device and a given website, despite having that content on the desktop version, doesn't make it available on its mobile version (completely different content across the two versions). In that case, we're doing the user a disservice.

What's the impact on my website's visibility?

We all want to give our visitors a mobile experience that's lightning fast, distraction free and focused on the task at hand. It's only natural, then, that the mobile version of a website is simpler than the version originally designed for desktop. Even within that principle, there are two typical ways of serving a mobile version of a website, which I'll refer to as follows:

1. Mobile version

2. Responsive version

The mobile version can be thought of as a variant of the original (desktop) website, where you're free to use different layouts and content compared with the desktop version. The responsive version dynamically adapts (via media queries) the layout and content of the desktop version to the format of mobile devices.

If your website is a responsive version, you can assume the impact is nil, since it's simply the desktop version adapted to mobile devices. If your website is a mobile version whose content is managed independently, there may be an impact if that content is in fact less relevant than the desktop version.

That said, there's no need to panic: mobile-first indexing comes down to how information is gathered by Google, not to how content is prioritised. What's more, if you happen not to have a mobile / responsive version (although this isn't recommended for user experience reasons), your website will still be indexed in Google.

My website already uses AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages). What should I do?

Nothing. In this case, Google will prefer to index the non-AMP mobile version of the page.

In summary

• Mobile-first indexing brings no ranking advantage and operates independently of the site's mobile assessment.
• Having mobile-friendly content is still useful for anyone looking for ways to perform better in mobile search results.
• Fast-loading content is still useful for anyone looking for ways to perform better for both mobile and desktop users.
• As always, ranking relies on multiple factors. Content that isn't exactly mobile-friendly or that loads slowly may still be shown, as long as the algorithm determines it's the most relevant content to display.

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