In today’s smartphone era everyone conducts most of their searches or online activity from a smartphone or mobile device. In an attempt to make search results more mobile friendly or adaptable to a mobile phone, google is introducing Mobile First Indexing.  Recently Google has acknowledged that they have started the initial rollout for mobile first indexing. This is not to say that the process has begun recently but just that Google has acknowledged the fact now.

Some sites have already been migrated to mobile first indexing and Google says it will migrate those websites that follow best practice in terms of mobile first indexing that means that sites which use dynamic serving or responsive web design will be in a better position when it comes to migrating them to mobile first indexing. If sites have an AMP and non- AMP version then Google will choose the non-AMP version when it comes to mobile first indexing.

So what basically is Mobile First Indexing?

Since most searches are conducted from a mobile device or smartphone rather than a desktop, Google wants to make its search engine more mobile friendly. A part of this process includes mobile-first indexing whereby the Googlebot will crawl and index only the mobile version of a particular website.

That is not to say that sites that do not have a mobile version will not be crawled and indexed, in such situations Googlebot will crawl and index that website as- is. There will not be a separate main index and mobile first index. All content will appear in one index but it’s just that Google will use the mobile version of the website wherever available.

Then what about Ranking in Mobile First Indexing? Will they be affected?

When it comes to site rankings Google assures website owners that the ranking of their website will not be affected with Mobile First Indexing. It  is just a change in the way in which Google gathers information for its own Google index. By getting your website migrated to mobile-first indexing, you will not have an advantage over a website that has not yet been migrated.

A feature that was in place since 2015 has been that when a search is conducted on a mobile device all content that is mobile friendly will be placed first in the search results and that will be the same now too.