These days thanks to our smartphones constantly being on our person all the time, we are starting to see a shift in the way we do certain things. For example shopping which used to be done on the desktop is starting to become more common on mobile devices, and users are also surfing a lot more on their phones than before.So much so that mobile-optimized websites are no longer an afterthought but almost a necessity. This is why Google has announced that they will be rolling out their mobile-first indexing when it comes to search results. The initial plan for mobile-first indexing was announced nearly two years ago and it looks like it has finally been brought to fruition.
For those unfamiliar with mobile-first indexing, basically for those who search on Google via their mobile devices, Google will try and prioritize search results where websites with mobile versions are returned in search results, at least where possible. The idea behind it is to give users the best experience when searching on their phones, where sometimes websites that have no mobile versions make it incredibly difficult to use on our smaller displays.
According to Google, “Mobile-first indexing is about how we gather content, not about how content is ranked. Content gathered by mobile-first indexing has no ranking advantage over mobile content that’s not yet gathered this way or desktop content. Moreover, if you only have desktop content, you will continue to be represented in our index.”
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