Mobile First Indexing

By now you’ve probably heard all about how important it is for your website to work well on mobile devices since this is how most people nowadays look things up on the internet. On July 1st, 2019, Google introduced mobile-first indexing and it has a lot of people freaking out (with good reason), but we’re here to break it down for you.

What Is Mobile-First Indexing?

It’s how Google crawls and indexes the web, Googlebot will firstly look at the mobile version of the page, whereas, until this summer it was only looking at the desktop version. Crawling is how Googlebot discovers new and updated pages. To simplify, Google will now index your page based on how it renders on a mobile phone compared to a desktop computer.

What Does It Mean for Your Site?

It is important to note that only new sites and those Google have not discovered yet will be indexed using mobile-first indexing. Older sites where the transition to mobile hasn’t happened yet will still be desktop indexed until they’re ready.

If you have a responsive site or a dynamic serving site where content is equivalent across mobile and desktop, you don’t have to change anything. In case you have a site configuration where the content is different across those versions, you should seriously consider making some changes.

Why Is It Important?

Mobile-first indexing is vital because if the end-user is getting different content on desktop versus the mobile version, your site will most likely not be seen by many, which will then lead to a decline in your online visibility and eventually a decrease in your profit margins. There’s no cute way to say this, it’s simply bad for your business if you don’t make some changes.

What Can You Do?

• Launching a new site? → contact us, so that we can make sure it works well on mobile devices and help you with ranking and indexing in Google.
• Test both versions out before the launch.
• Pay attention to your structured data and alt-text images on mobile pages.
• You can use robots.txt testing tool to certify that your mobile version is accessible to Googlebot
• Have the same content on the mobile site that you have on the desktop version
• Metadata should be present on both versions as well
• Ad a rel= ”canonical” tag on the mobile version so it points to the right desktop URL

What Can Iconis Agency Do for You?

We know this is a lot of information to take in, so we’re happy to let you know a couple of things:

1. If you’re building a new site – contact us & let us deal with the technicalities.
2. If you have a site but are not sure what the quality of it is – contact us & we’ll evaluate it for FREE (it is as good as it sounds).
3. None of this refers to you, you just love the digital realm? We love it too! Let’s grab a coffee and talk about all things digital. 😉