Google’s mobile-first indexing initiative that began seven years ago is now over, according to Google. “This has been a long journey, getting from the beginning to here. We are pleased to announce that the journey to Mobile First indexing is now complete “, Google’s John Miller wrote on the Google blog.
Mobile-First indexing is complete
After several years of implementation, Google has completely switched to Mobile-First indexing. This means that Google prioritizes mobile versions when crawling pages and indexing content.
The change reflects Google’s increased focus on mobile devices that began in 2016. At that time, Google updated its search algorithm to favor mobile-friendly sites. The following year, the company began the mobile indexing process by preferring to crawl mobile-friendly pages instead of desktop ones.
Google first introduced mobile-first indexing back in November 2016, and by December 2018, half of all sites in Google’s search results were from mobile-first indexing. It simply means that Google will index your site from the eyes of a mobile browser and use that mobile version for indexing and ranking.
Now after several years of work, Google is celebrating the job done:
“Over the years, mobile web traffic has continued to grow; in some regions, people almost exclusively use their phone to access the Internet. Thank you – site owners, SEO experts, web developers, designers and everyone who works on websites – for helping to make the mobile web a success!”
Mobile search provides a better user experience
Google also added that there is a “very small set of sites that don’t work at all on mobile devices.” Google explained that the reasons for this are “primarily that the page displays errors to all mobile users, that the mobile version of the site is blocked with robots.txt while the desktop version is crawlable, or that all pages on the mobile site redirect to the Home page . ”
Google has said that these types of issues are not Google’s ability to resolve. Google said that ” for now, we will continue to try to index these sites using our old Googlebot desktop crawler and will reevaluate the list several times a year .” In addition, the company will further reduce the indexing of desktop pages to save resources.
Related changes in Search Console
In a related change, Google is removing indexing crawler data from Search Console. Once the change is complete, this data is no longer needed, as all functional sites are indexed via mobile devices.
The multi-year shift to mobile-first indexing reflects the increasing importance of mobile devices in Internet usage worldwide. When the rollout was complete, Google fully embraced mobile devices as the primary way users access the web.
For more news and interesting stories , visit our blog page or follow our Instagram profile.
Made by Nebojša Radovanović – SEO Expert @Digitizer
Pročitaj:
