What is Mobile First indexing? Simply put, it determines the search rank score for a page or a site based on its mobile web performance. A sites mobile performance is not always the same as its traditional or desktop performance, and today’s guidance puts webmasters on notice — get mobile-ready by September, or suffer a loss of search rank.
That may feel harsh, but we’ve all known this was coming for a long time. Google has been using mobile first web crawlers to index the web since 2016. Since then we’ve seen initiatives like AMP assist websites in handling the challenges of dealing with these small screens and touch interfaces. Today’s announcement is the final part of that move.
Web development is not static. You may have noticed a major redesign of Ausdroid last month. Why did we do that? Simple. We noticed that despite constant maintenance and updates the site was becoming less responsive. The solution? A complete front end rebuild, optimising for speed overall and mobile specifically.
This is what it takes to exist on the modern web, so if you’re a webmaster and you’d prefer to rank in Google search, make sure you’re optimising for mobile web. You’ll find Google’s guidelines for optimising for mobile first web indexing right here.
If Google are going to be dumping on sites designed to work properly on desktop browsers, then does that mean Google are likely to turn Chrome for desktop into an mobile product on desktop, simple to force more sites to be mobile compliant?