New Mobile-First Index By Google Is Already Rolling Out
The Roll out of Google's mobile-first index has already begun. If you aren't familiar with Google's index, they have their own Googlebot that crawls websites as a desktop user to add to it's search index and give ranks to each of these sites. So far, The index has only been from desktops and during this roll out stage of the mobile index, there will be two indexes .
The reason is no surprise since mobile users has surpassed desktop users a couple of years ago and the future will just be one index, the mobile index.
Why does this matter?
If you have your own website you run, you may have a desktop layout of your page. The Googlebot will crawl as a mobile user and rank the site to mobile guidelines. So site owners could see their site further down the index rankings and no one want's to see that. Search Engine Optimizations(SEO) has the dominant mobile audience now and it would benefit anyone who has not already started making the changes.The index change won't have a huge effect on rankings but it is early to say. It would be smart to optimize webpages for mobile if you haven't already.
Along with the mobile index comes changes and a great one is expandable content.
According to Google’s Gary Illyes, content hidden in tabs and accordions will have the same weight as content that’s plainly displayed on the page. Google understands that expandable content makes much more sense on a mobile platform because of limited screen real estate. That’s why the company won’t punish webmasters who take advantage of those design features. That's a big win for UX and SEO!
If you want to know what your page looks like to the Googlebot, go check out the Google Search Console(Formerly GoogleWebmasters), on the left menu click on "crawl" and "fetch as google."
For more on testing the Googlebot head over to the original article: Google's New Mobile-First Index and the Death of Desktop SEO
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In my own website I have found it necessary to construct two separate sites. One for mobile, and one for tablet and desktop users. The switching mechanism being triggered by the users screen width.
It would be interesting to know whether Google account for this, and switch to the appropriate analysis, or whether they expect a website to be layed out to accommodate both mobile and desktop through some kind of reformatting.
That's what they are doing. Reformatting the index to just a mobile format.
That's bad, all those nice designer graphics, typefaces and layouts are about to be dumped for single column format. Come to think of it, that probably is a good idea. Perhaps Microsoft will re-issue FrontPage. :)
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