Google has been very clear: mobile pages are going to be more important than desktop versions in the near future, Google's index will be mobile-first. Are your pages ready for the new Google index? What do your web pages look like when crawled by a mobile robot?
What is Google's mobile-first?
A few weeks ago, Google announced that web pages will be classified based on the mobile version:
“Today, most people are searching on Google using a mobile device, however our ranking systems still typically look at the desktop version of a page's content to assess its relevance to the user.
This can cause problems when the mobile page has less content than the desktop page because our algorithms are not evaluating the actual page that is viewed by a mobile searcher.
To make our results more useful, we have started experiments to make our index mobile-first. Although our search index will remain a single index of websites and apps, our algorithms will primarily use the mobile version of a site's content to rank pages on that site, understand structured data, and display snippets of those pages in our results.
The mobile version of your website is going to be more important than the desktop version of your website soon. If your website can't display correctly on mobile devices, your rankings could drop drastically.
Could there be problems with the mobile version?
Some website owners want to make their mobile pages more efficient. For this reason, not all content from the desktop version is included in the mobile version.
When Google uses a new index that is based on the mobile version of your pages, these contents will be lost and your rankings could change dramatically.
How to perform mobile tracking of your website
If you want to ensure that Google can index the mobile version of your web pages correctly, you should perform mobile crawling on your website.
The new website audit tool at SEOprofiler can do this. Simply go to the web audit tool configuration page and select “Googlebot Mobile” as the user-agent:
With that option, the website audit tool will check the mobile version of your web pages. If there are any problems, the web audit tool will find them.
If you want to optimize your pages for mobile search results, SEOprofiler's Top 10 Optimizer can help.
