Week 13 – Mobile First Indexing

Here we again, week 13 (halfway) of the #atozofseo which brings us on to:

🄼 for Mobile-First Indexing (MFI)

Historically if you’ve carried out a search on Google, it was the DESKTOP version of the site that you were querying the indexing of. (Remember, Google crawls sites to index the data/content on them). So, even if you used a mobile you were getting a result/snapshot of the desktop versions of the site.

That’s all changed now – Google uses the MOBILE version of a site for crawling and indexing – thus showing Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). Most sites have switched, I don’t think they’ve quite finished yet.

You can find out when you switched via Search Console. On the settings page, you’ll see something that says “Indexing crawler

Googlebot smartphone (switched on – then date)” So if you saw a traffic drop off around then, it could be down to the quality & content of your MOBILE site.

For most sites, this isn’t a huge problem. If you’ve got a responsive site (works & looks the same across multiple devices, you should be ok), but if you have something like a “m. version” of your site you need to be careful – as most of the time this is different to your main site.

As well as content (being the same) you need to look at mobile speed, metadata and placement of any Ads.

Further reading links on MFI – Google techy stuff  – this guide from SEJ & this tool to compare versions of your site.