Getting your site ready for mobile-first indexing

Monday, December 18, 2017

When we announced almost a year ago that we're experimenting with mobile-first indexing, we said we'd update publishers about our progress, something that we've done the past few months through public talks in office hours and at conferences like Pubcon.

To recap, currently our crawling, indexing, and ranking systems typically look at the desktop version of a page's content, which may cause issues for mobile searchers when that version is vastly different from the mobile version. Mobile-first indexing means that we'll use the mobile version of the content for indexing and ranking, to better help our—primarily mobile—users find what they're looking for. Webmasters will see significantly increased crawling by Smartphone Googlebot, and the snippets in the results, as well as the content on the Google cache pages, will be from the mobile version of the pages.

As we said, sites that make use of responsive web design and correctly implement dynamic serving (that include all of the desktop content and markup) generally don't have to do anything. Here are some extra tips that help ensure a site is ready for mobile-first indexing:

  • Make sure the mobile version of the site also has the important, high-quality content. This includes text, images (with alt attributes), and videos - in the usual crawlable and indexable formats.
  • Structured data is important for indexing and search features that users love: it should be both on the mobile and desktop version of the site. Ensure URLs within the structured data are updated to the mobile version on the mobile pages.
  • Metadata should be present on both versions of the site. It provides hints about the content on a page for indexing and serving. For example, make sure that titles and meta descriptions are equivalent across both versions of all pages on the site.
  • No changes are necessary for interlinking with separate mobile URLs (m.-dot sites). For sites using separate mobile URLs, keep the existing link rel=canonical and link rel=alternate elements between these versions.
  • Check hreflang links on separate mobile URLs. When using link rel=hreflang tags for internationalization, link between mobile and desktop URLs separately. Your mobile URLs' hreflang should point to the other language/region versions on other mobile URLs, and similarly link desktop with other desktop URLs using hreflang link elements there.
  • Ensure the servers hosting the site have enough capacity to handle potentially increased crawl rate. This doesn't affect sites that use responsive web design and dynamic serving, only sites where the mobile version is on a separate host, such as m.example.com.

We will be evaluating sites independently on their readiness for mobile-first indexing based on the above criteria and transitioning them when ready. This process has already started for a handful of sites and is closely being monitored by the search team.

We continue to be cautious with rolling out mobile-first indexing. We believe taking this slowly will help site owners get their sites ready for mobile users, and because of that, we currently don't have a timeline for when it's going to be completed. If you have any questions, drop by our Webmaster forums or our public events.

Posted by Gary Illyes