Google Mobile-First Indexing starting from July
Google brings back Mobile-First indexing as the default ranking signal based on how your website performs on mobile devices. Mobile-First Indexing by Google is a new indexing method initiated by Google to provide high priority for the mobile version of your website.
Basically, Google Mobile-first indexing is not a new update. This was released by Google in November 2016, as an aim to promote more mobile-friendly websites. After a short span, from July 1st, 2019 Google brings back Mobile-First Indexing as a prime factor of indexing websites. Here, when Mobile-First Indexing starts its action again Google keeps a benchmark for existing website users. For now, Google had started monitoring and evaluating the pages based on the dynamic serving and separate URLs. But Google brings an end to this scenario and brings Mobile-First Indexing.
Here an important fact to be noted is that Mobile-First indexing will be classifying your websites according to the category they belong to and will be indexing based on monitoring on which all aspects they lags or gains in Mobile Version. Afterall the sites which already respond to mobiles limitation can boost their ranks in SERP.Here are how Mobile-First Indexing Means.
As you know a Mobile Site is just a primary version of the desktop site, even thought keeping these two as equivalent in all perspectives can maintain the ranking or even increase. By having the same desktop site as mobile helps Google to signify your website as a brand.
Why Google brings back Google Mobile-First Indexing?
Google brings Mobile-First indexing, in addition, to deliver more diverse and mobile-friendly websites to users. It is considered that around 60% to 80% of people around the globe use mobile for their different searches. So, Google says,
“Today, most of the users prefer smartphones for internet usage, in this scenario, some of the websites which are ranked higher in our search results lag-off in many situations when it comes to mobile versions. For overcoming this situation we have developed Mobile-First Indexing. Through this, we are looking forward to increasing more mobile user engagements of websites and to provide them better results”.
How to prepare for Google Mobile-First Indexing
There are some important factors to be noted while preparing for Google Mobile-First Indexing and they are listed below.
- Content is always a prevailing character of any website. Having rich and unique content can bring webpages rank higher in search results. So, make sure that content in desktop site matches on mobile. In simple, both mobile and desktop should have the same content.
- Metadata is another prominent set of characters. Make sure that both the platforms have the same meta Tag and Descriptions.
- Structured Data should include the same data on both desktop and mobile versions of the site. URLs shown in structured data on the mobile version should have the same URLs and make sure of not adding unnecessary structured data that are not relevant.
- Hreflang takes care of using rel=hreflang for multi-regional and multilingual sites. When used in mobile version URLs it should point towards mobile version of the country or language variant, at the same time the same process comes to the desktop version, when it is used in desktop point towards the country or language variant. Below here is an example of hreflang
Social Tags can be used like Facebook, Twitter cards and other social media both in desktop and mobile versions.
Webmaster Verification should be done for both mobile and desktop versions. At present, most of you might only have indexed the desktop version in the search console. But from now on indexing should be done for both platforms.
Server Capability process a key role in maintaining a site ranking. Make sure that your site uses a better and more efficient web server and will be able to handle a number of crawl rates. So that it makes the site run smoother.
App Indexation is done for those sites which use apps for a desktop site. While working with this ensure that you have verified the mobile version of the site in relation to app association files etc.
Switch URLs are used to identify mobile and desktop platforms. If you haven’t used it in your sites, try to implement it. So that google can identify both the platforms easily.
The responsive site is a mandatory factor of a better website. As the site gets reduced its size, all the above-mentioned factors should not get lost. Having a site which responds to all the environment without losing any of the factors can rank higher.
Robots.txt directives and robots meta tags should be verified for both the versions were both robot.txt specifies which part of the website should be scrolled and robot meta tag specifies which part of the site may or may not be indexed.
Link Elements between mobile and desktop should be correct for rel=canonical and rel=alternate.
These are the important aspects to know if you have a separate Mobile site.
Moreover from the beginning of 2019 Google has come-up with dynamic changes some of the most significant among them was Search Diversity change, and another usual change was Google Menu Design Change and at last this. Well with this update Google tries to bring more diversities in their indexing at the same time they are focusing to deliver more user-friendly websites to their users. Here below check out the official Tweet of Google on Mobile-First Indexing.
