Mobile First Indexing. What it means for you and your website

Google recently announced they are switching to mobile first indexing. What does it mean for you and your website?

On 27 March, Google began to implement mobile-first indexing. In their words, "... being like a a single library that is now beginning to replace print books (desktop pages) with ebooks (mobile pages). Over time, the library will be mostly ebooks (mobile). But print books (desktop) will always remain part of the mix in the library."

This is after 18 months of  testing and experimentation, and represents Google's latest efforts to make the internet more mobile-friendly and resemble user trends.
Back in 2016, Google first detailed its plan to change the way its search index operates, alerting us how the algorithms would eventually shift to use the mobile version of a website’s content.
What does this mean for means for the average business owner. Do you have to change anything? Nothing? Everything? If your site is mobile-friendly, will that be good enough?

So, what exactly is mobile-first indexing?

Think of the phrase “mobile-first” as a reference to the fact that the mobile version will be considered the primary version of your website. So if your mobile and desktop versions are equivalent — for instance if you’ve optimized your content for mobile, and/or if you use responsive design — this change should (in theory) not have any significant impact in terms of your site’s performance in search results.

Notifications for webmasters

Expect a notification via Google Search Console if the sites you manage have been switched over to the new mobile-first indexing process.

Google will send out a notification that says “mobile=first indexing is enabled” for your site. It will look similar to the example below:

What should you do?

To prepare for the shift, Moz has recommended these initial steps to make sure your site is ready:

• Content: make sure your mobile version has all the valuable content that exists on your desktop site. Make sure the formats used on the mobile version are crawlable and indexable (including alt-attributes for images).
• Structured data: you should include the same structured data markup on both the mobile and desktop versions of the site. URLs shown within structured data on mobile pages should be the mobile version of the URL. Avoid adding unnecessary structured data if it isn’t relevant to the specific content of a page.
• Metadata: ensure that titles and meta descriptions are equivalent on both versions of all pages.
• Hreflang: if you use rel=hreflang for internationalization, your mobile URLs’ hreflang annotations should point to the mobile version of your country or language variants, and desktop URLs should point to the desktop versions.
• Social metadata: OpenGraph tags, Twitter cards and other social metadata should be included on the mobile version as well as the desktop version.
• XML and media sitemaps: ensure that your links to sitemaps are accessible from the mobile version of the site. This also applies to robots directives (robots.txt and on-page meta-robots tags) and potentially even trust signals, like links to your privacy policy page.
• Search Console verification: if you have only verified your desktop site in Google Search Console, make sure you also add and verify the mobile version.
• App indexation: if you have app indexation set up for your desktop site, you may want to ensure that you have verified the mobile version of the site in relation to app association files, etc.