Announcing Google indexing via mobile user-agent

It’s official: from March 2021, web content on Google will no longer be visited by the desktop-user agent. Is your website ready for the update?

What is Google indexing?

Every time you perform a search on Google, you’ll receive a list of website results that Google deems most relevant to your search. The order in which these links are presented to you is determined by Google’s algorithm for indexing websites. Google’s bots regularly scan and evaluate the relevance of a site’s content, to present you with the results that best match your query.

Why mobile first?

Google bots initially crawled the desktop version of a web page, but with the rise in mobile usage, Google is questioning and changing the way it crawls content. Websites sometimes display different information on their desktop and mobile versions, often with less content on the mobile version, in an attempt to optimize content for the smaller screen size. However, as mobile usage continues to outstrip desktop, Google wants the internet to be more mobile-centric.

Mobile-first indexing: a long history

November 2016

Google first announced that it had begun the process of transitioning its indexing from desktop to mobile, as most users at the time were already searching from a mobile device. The announcement explained that “algorithms will eventually primarily use the mobile version of a site’s content to rank that site’s pages”, giving website owners fair warning to begin the mobile optimization process.

July 2019

Mobile-first indexing was enabled by default for all new websites. At this stage, Google was also monitoring and evaluating existing pages and moving them to mobile-first indexing when they were ready. Your website’s mobile indexing status can be checked using the URL inspection tool.

March 2020

Google has announced that it will switch to mobile-only indexing from September 2020. At the time of this announcement, it was reported that 70% of the sites listed in Google’s search results had already been transferred to the new system.

July 2020

In the depths of the Coronavirus pandemic, Google has extended its mobile-first indexing schedule from September 2020 to the end of March 2021, giving sites more time to prepare for the change.

How can I prepare for the change?

Mobile-first indexing means that Google will only obtain information about your site from the mobile version to determine indexing and ranking. So it’s essential that Google bot can see the full content and resources of your site there (desktop-only sites will be removed from the index). It’s important to note that Google Search will continue to display the most appropriate URL for users (whether desktop or mobile).

Google has provided a detailed guide to help sites optimize their mobile operability. Here are some important considerations:

– If you have structured data on your site, make sure it’s present on both versions of your site so Google bot can see all your content
– Use the same metadata on both versions of your site.
– Respect the “Better Ads” standard when displaying ads on mobile devices
– Make sure images on your mobile site follow best practices for images (important: make sure all images on your mobile have a descriptive tag)
– Ensure that videos on your mobile site follow video best practices.
– If your site has separate URLs for desktop and mobile versions of a page :

Be sure to use structured tags for both desktop and mobile versions.

Use the robots.txt test tool to check that your mobile version is accessible to Google bot.

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