Google to switch all websites to mobile-first indexing by Sept 2020

Posted: 9th April 2020

When developing a website, one thing to take into consideration is how responsive it is across different devices. In 2019, 52% of global website traffic came from people using mobile devices. With more people searching via mobile phones, it makes sense that you ensure your website is responsive on mobile devices. For a few years now, Google has been working on mobile-first indexing. They have recently announced that they will be switching to this completely in September 2020.

But what is mobile-first indexing? In this post, we will explain what it is and how you can prepare your website for the change.

Mobile-first indexing

Mobile-first indexing means that when Google bots scan your website, they will use the mobile version of content for indexing. This means that you need to make sure all your content on mobile devices is easily accessible. Up until September, your website will be moved to mobile-first indexing when Googles systems recognise that it is ready. Google’s top advice for making your website mobile friendly is:

• Make sure any content (including text, images, videos, and links) are the same on both mobile and desktop view
• All metadata and structured data is the same
• Do not use separate mobile URLs

This update is relevant to all new and existing websites. If you are having a new website built, make sure that it is responsive across a range of different devices. This will mean that once your site has been indexed, your ranking will not be impacted.

When your domain is switched to mobile-first indexing, you will see an increase in Googlebot’s crawling your site. There are multiple ways you can check to see if your site has been indexed for mobiles. The status will be shown on the settings page of your Search Console. It will also be displayed in the URL inspection Tool when you check a specific URL.

Whilst your website will still occasionally be crawled via the desktop version, it will predominantly be done via Google’s mobile smartphone user-agent. The user-name will match the Chromium version used for rendering.

Find out more

If you would like to find out how the team at Priority Pixels can help make your website responsive across different devices, then get in touch today by emailing: hello@prioritypixels.co.uk