Implementation of mobile indexing
Today Google announces that after a year and a half of careful experimentation and testing, it is beginning to migrate sites that follow best practices for indexing on mobile devices.
This is what Google does not report:
In short, our crawling, indexing, and ranking systems typically use the desktop version of a page's content, which can cause problems for mobile searchers when that version is very different from the mobile version. Mobile indexing means that we will use the mobile version of the page to index and rank it, to better help our primarily mobile users find what they are looking for.
We continue to have a single index that we use to display search results. We do not have a “rolling index” that is separate from our main index. Historically, the desktop version was indexed, but increasingly, we will use mobile versions of content.
We're notifying sites migrating to mobile indexing through Search Console. Site owners will see a significantly higher crawl rate from the Googlebot Smartphone. Additionally, Google will show the mobile version of the pages in search results and Google cached pages.
To understand more about how we determine a site's mobile content, see our developer documentation. Covers how sites using responsive web design or dynamic serving are typically set up for mobile indexing. For sites that have both AMP and non-AMP pages, Google will prefer to index the mobile version of the non-AMP page.
Sites not in this initial wave don't need to panic. Mobile indexing is about how we collect content, not how content is classified. Content collected through mobile-first indexing does not have a ranking advantage over mobile content that has not yet been gathered in this way or desktop content. Additionally, if you only have desktop content, it will still be represented in our index.
Having said this, We continue to encourage webmasters to make their content mobile-friendly. We evaluate all content in our index, whether desktop or mobile, to determine how mobile-friendly it is. Since 2015, this measure can help mobile-optimized content perform better for those searching on mobile devices. Related, we recently announced that starting in July 2018, content that loads slowly may underperform for both desktop and mobile search engines.
Remember:
- Mobile indexing is being deployed more widely. Being indexed in this way does not have a ranking advantage and works independently of our mobile-friendly evaluation.
- Having mobile-optimized content is still useful for those looking for ways to get better results in mobile search.
- Having fast-loading content is still useful for those looking for ways to get better results for mobile and desktop users.
- As always, the ranking uses many factors. We may show content to users that is not mobile-friendly or slow-loading if our many other signals determine that it is the most relevant content to display.
We will continue to monitor and evaluate this change carefully. If you have any questions, please visit our webmaster forums or our public events
