Google recently announced Mobile-First Indexing after a year and half of extensive experimenting and testing. The search engine giant will start migrating sites that follow best practices for Mobile-First Indexing.
Google’s algorithm will now prioritize websites with a mobile version when searched from a smartphone. It will now consider mobile sites as the first node to the websites, especially when a query is fired from the mobile platform. This will surely increase the traffic for companies having mobile websites being crawled from the Smartphone Googlebot.
Websites that only have a desktop version will experience a major downfall in mobile traffic, even if they have a high ranking on the search engine because Google does not maintain separate indices for different version of the websites.
The websites using responsive web design or dynamic serving will generally be set for mobile-first indexing. For sites that have non-AMP and AMP pages, Google will prefer the mobile version of the non-AMP page for indexing. To make the change easier and smooth, Google will be notifying sites that are migrating to mobile-first indexing via Search Console.
What does it change for you?
Companies with ‘desktop-only sites’ will have downfall in their primarily mobile audience. It might not affect your ranking but you will need responsive websites and mobile-friendly content to perform better in mobile search results.
The update is a part of Google’s announcement that said that beginning in July 2018, slow loading content will perform less as Google will be optimizing for speed.
Long story short, you will have to make some amends!
For more details on how you can get your website optimized for better performance after the update, contact us.