From TechCrunch: Google announced today it’s now using mobile-first indexing for over half the web pages shown in its search results globally – a significant milestone in Google’s move to favor mobile sites over desktop sites in its search results.
The plans for the project have been in the works for years.
The company had first detailed its efforts around mobile-first indexing back in 2016, where it explained the impacts to how its search index operates. It said it would shift over to using the mobile version of a website’s content to index its pages, as well as to understand its structured data and show snippets from the site in Google’s search results.
Its reasoning behind the change is simple: most people today search Google from a mobile device, not a desktop computer. But Google’s ranking systems for the web were originally built for the desktop era. They still typically look at the desktop version of the page’s content to determine its relevance to the user.
This, obviously, causes problems when the desktop site and the mobile site are not in sync.
Before responsive web design became more commonplace, many site owners built a separate, simpler and sometimes less informative version of their site for their mobile web visitors. These users may have been guided to the site because of Google Search. But once there, they couldn’t find what they were looking for because it was only available on the desktop version of the web page.
In December 2017, Google said it had begun to transition a small handful of sites to mobile-first indexing.
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