The Time Has Come for Mobile-Only Indexing. Is your website up to date

The Time Has Come for Mobile-Only Indexing. Is your website up to date?

Google has been using mobile-first indexing for years, which means that when it comes to indexing and ranking a website, it takes the mobile version of the website into consideration first. Beginning today, Google will only consider mobile-friendly websites, with desktop versions being removed from the index entirely.

What does this mean for you and your situation? If your company has separate mobile and desktop websites, Google will recognize only your mobile website as existing, even if your company has both. The Google search engine will ignore any important images, content, or information that appears only on the desktop version of the website.

Steps you must take to ensure that Google can see the entire content of your mobile website

1. Double-check your robots meta tags: Make certain that the robots meta tags on the mobile version of your website are the same as those on the desktop version. Incorporating noindex and nofollow tags into the HTML code of your mobile site may prevent Google from indexing and following links on your site.
2. When it comes to key content on your mobile site, lazy loading (which only loads images after a user performs an action such as swiping or typing) should be avoided because Google will not trigger those user interactions and will therefore not see content that requires a trigger action to load.
3. Do not disable crawling: To ensure that Google can crawl all of the URLs on your mobile site, make sure that your robots.txt file does not prevent them from being crawled.
4. Make sure your desktop and mobile content is consistent: If your mobile site has less content (both page content and clear page headers) than your desktop site, either add the missing content to the mobile site or be aware that your site may lose some traffic and search ranking as Google adjusts to having less information on the mobile site. 5.
5. Ensure that you are not using smaller, low-resolution images on your mobile site, as poor quality images may not be included in Google Images or receive favorable search placement. Check to see that all images have high-quality alt text, and place images and videos in prominent areas on your mobile site so that they are easy to find.
6. When the URLs for your images on your mobile site differ from the URLs for your images on your desktop site, you may experience a temporary loss of visitors while Google indexes the mobile versions. This can be avoided by making sure that the URLs for the images on your mobile site are the same as the URLs for the images on your desktop site, which Google will already be familiar with.
7. Make use of schema markup for videos: If your site makes use of VideoObject structured data to describe the videos that live on the site, make sure the mobile version of the site also includes the VideoObject schema, as well as any additional information that may be required, so that Google can understand what the videos are about and display them appropriately in searches.

In addition to these Google-specific considerations, you should make certain that your mobile users have a positive experience. This includes having a responsive layout, a fast website, mobile-friendly navigation, and easily clickable buttons and callouts, among other things.