Google To Switch All Sites Mobile-First Indexing By September 2020

Mar 17, 2020 | Member News

Several years ago, Google announced their intentions to switch to a Mobile-First index. What this means is that regardless of how sophisticated or well-made your desktop website is, if the mobile-version is not up to par, your company website will take a hit in the search rankings. Contact Crush the Rankings today to find out if your website is positioned for this big change!
Barry Schwartz, of SEO Roundtable said the following: “Big news yesterday, but we saw it coming, was that Google announced all sites are going to be moved over to mobile-first indexing by September 2020. Google is sending out notices about this, Google started doing that last week. But Google also said that 70% of the sites served in search already are through mobile-first indexing.

So Google only has to move over 30% of the remainder of those sites in the index (well, probably a bigger number than 30% if you count by what is in Google’s index versus what Google serves to searchers).

So this effort will have taken Google about four-years to move from a desktop-first indexing process to a mobile-first indexing process. What that means, if this is new to you, is Google will crawl and index your site based on the way a mobile phone (i.e. Chrome on Android) looks at your web site.

The remaining 30% are those sites that look so differently; in terms of content, structured data, links, images, etc when comparing the desktop and mobile site – that Google feels it is a bit dangerous to move the site. Dangerous in that it will drop in rankings if moved.

So Google is notifying webmasters of the issues they need to address by September so the site can move over to mobile-first indexing. If you do nothing, then the rankings will probably shift for the site.”

For more information, visit Crush the Rankings.