What is Google’s Mobile-First Indexing?

Shortly before the holidays, Google made a major announcement in regards to the future of search results. In short, Google will be breaking away from the traditional desktop search index and moving to a mobile-first search index.

Google’s Official Announcement

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.

(You can Click here to read the full announcement on Googleblog.)

What This Means to You

This is a major change and something you need to take action on if your website is NOT Mobile Responsive.

Mobile search has taken over desktop with more people accessing Google via their smartphones, iPads and Tablets. Therefore, Google’s making mobile the dominant index.

Do you need to do anything about Mobile-First Indexing?

YES – IF your website is not mobile responsive and/or your website does not provide all of the same content to mobile users that it provides to traditional desktop users.
NO – IF your website is already coded as mobile responsive and you are providing all of the same information on both mobile and desktop versions.

What if you have an old WordPress site and you’re using a plugin to create the mobile version of your site?

As long as you’re using a plugin designed to display all of the content that’s on your website (as opposed to only showing the bare minimums), you’re good to go.

In Summary…

If you’ve ignored mobile considerations, you cannot continue to do so any longer and expect Google to pay attention to your website. Mobile users are your dominant visitors; You need to make sure your website does not frustrate them or they’ll simply move on to the next website.