Google is all set to consider the mobile version of any new website for indexing, evaluating and ranking the site, instead of the desktop version which have been used primarily. Google announces that all new websites would be analyzed and ranked based on “mobile-first indexing” on the search starting July 1st, 2019.
John Mueller, Developer Advocate, Google, wrote in a blog-post on Tuesday, “We’re happy to announce that ‘mobile-first indexing’ will be enabled by default for all new, previously unknown to Google Search websites, starting July 1, 2019”.
Businesses and developers can continue to check for mobile-first indexing of their websites by using the URL Inspection Tool in Search Console. By looking at a URL on your website there, you’ll quickly see how it was last crawled and indexed. For older websites, they will continue monitoring and evaluating pages for their readiness for mobile first indexing, and will then notify them through Search Console once they’re seen as being ready. Since the default state for new websites will be mobile-first indexing, there’s no need to send any notification.
However, Google would determine the readiness for “mobile-first indexing” of older and existing websites bases on the parity of content including images, texts, links, structured data and links as well as descriptions and meta-data-like titles.
Mueller said in his most, “We will notify them through Search Console once they’re seen as being ready. Since the default state for new websites will be ‘mobile-first indexing’, there’s no need to send a notification”. Google said it is pleased to see that “mobile-first indexing” has come a long way since the last decade when the internet was not easily accessed using mobiles.
He concluded in his post, “We’re happy to see how the web has evolved from being focused on desktop to becoming mobile-friendly, and now to being mostly crawlable and indexable with mobile user-agents”.
Google explained the change to how websites are indexed is aimed at aiding the company’s “primarily mobile” users to better browse the web. Since 2015, the majority of Google users start their searches from mobile devices due to advancement of cellphones. It only makes sense, then, that the mobile versions of the website — and not the desktop pages — would be used to deliver the search results.
