Google officially announced indexing Mobile-website first. This announcement has given rise to several questions like what does Mobile-first Indexing Mean. Will it affect the Desktop users? Will Websites that are not mobile-friendly will suffer and come to a halt? How will Google handle Mobile-friendly websites first?
Google is going through various processes that would ensure the solutions to these questions are resolved without any hassle.
Let us first understand the Meaning of Mobile-first indexing
To begin with, let us look closer at some of the confusing terms that are frequently used in this online marketplace.
- Crawling: In this process, Google follows the links available on your web page and then apply dofollow file rules.
- Indexing: Google turns your web page to a more useable form and stores the content in its database. This is basically an addiction.
- Retrieval: The first step of searching any query is Retrieval. This comes even before ranking your web page. An important part of Rankbrain, Hummingbird, etc. like SEO tools.
- Ranking:As the name suggest is a general term that is linked to ranking your web page. Most of the ranking part occurs only at the time of Retrieval.
- Penalties: Google starts penalizing sites after retrieval stage. Websites containing copied content, bad quality content, and a least meaningful information are liable for a penalty by Google.
Hope, these basic confusing terms are clear now. Let us move on to Mobile-First Indexing first:
Until now, Google was ranking desktop sites but now due to the rising popularity and usage of mobile-friendly websites, it has changed its searching parameters to mobile-first.
Google until now has only one index and that was based on desktop-friendly site. Let us look at the search process:
- The first step is that Google creates signals that are Googlebot based and basically suited to the desktop users.
- After this, Google crawls with the mobile Googlebot and gather signals that are mobile friendly. But no index was designed for the mobile site.
- Now, when any user searches for content whether desktop or mobile, algorithm retrieval part would index Desktop sites first and then starts ranking the web content.
- Then a mobile crawler searches for mobile-data and adjusts web page ranking accordingly.
This really caused issues while viewing search engine results. Some sites that promised to be compatible with mobile version actually did not run successfully on the mobile device.
Now the Google has taken an official step to stop the occurrence of these issues.
There is a lot of difference between “mobile friendly” “mobile indexes”. Mobile friendly is basically associated with mobile ranking whereas Indexing is done content to the reliance of the web page content. A site may or may not be mobile-friendly but it has to be mobile indexed.
While taking of Mobile-First Indexed websites, a website should be responsive or it should have a separate mobile site or the site doesn’t have any mobile website at all.
Hopefully, you find this information useful and consider it while creating your web content.
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