{"id":18350,"date":"2018-04-17T10:28:20","date_gmt":"2018-04-17T07:28:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cognitiveseo.com\/blog\/?p=18350"},"modified":"2018-08-08T09:41:26","modified_gmt":"2018-08-08T06:41:26","slug":"mobile-first-index-mobile-seo","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cognitiveseo.com\/blog\/18350\/mobile-first-index-mobile-seo\/","title":{"rendered":"Mobile-First Index Rolled Out. 5 Steps to Upgrade Your Mobile SEO Efforts"},"content":{"rendered":"

Google started talking about the Mobile-first indexing since November 04, 2016. At that time, Google announced that they wanted to make some experiments with their algorithm so it would primarily use the mobile version to rank pages from a website, to understand the structured data and to show it accordingly in the mobile search results.<\/p>\n

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Google\u2019s system for crawling, indexing, and ranking was using the desktop version of the website, which led to lots of issues for mobile searches because the mobile version was most of the times different than the desktop site. Basically, you could have content about dental cleaning on desktop and content about a completely different topic, such as paid loans, on mobile. \u00a0<\/p>\n

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\"Mobile-First-Index-Impact-on-SEO\"<\/p>\n

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To help webmasters in the process, here are five ways to make the shift to a more mobile-focused index less painful and as safe as possible.<\/p>\n

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  1. Create Responsive Website and Dynamic Serving Website<\/a><\/strong><\/li>\n
  2. Serve Structured Data for the Desktop and Mobile Version<\/a><\/strong><\/li>\n
  3. Use the Robots.Txt Testing Tool to Verify the Mobile Site<\/a><\/strong><\/li>\n
  4. Add Your Mobile Site in Search Console<\/a><\/strong><\/li>\n
  5. Verify the Crawl Rate<\/a><\/strong><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

     <\/p>\n

    When the official announcement<\/strong><\/a> about the mobile-first indexing launch was made on March 26, 2018, that meant Google started using the mobile version on the website for indexing and creating the baseline for how they determined rankings.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n
    Sites that are not in this initial wave don\u2019t need to panic. Google mobile-first indexing is about how we gather content, not about how content is ranked. Content gathered by mobile-first indexing has no ranking advantage over mobile content that\u2019s not yet gathered this way or desktop content. Moreover, if you only have desktop content, you will continue to be represented in our index.<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
    \"Google<\/td>\nGoogle<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
     <\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n

    Google\u2019s documentation<\/strong><\/a> for mobile-first index explains thoroughly how the mobile content from a site is determined. There are things that don\u2019t need to be changed and others that must be different from the desktop version. Next, we\u2019ve tackled the topic and gathered a handful of best practices.<\/p>\n

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    1. Create Responsive Website or Dynamic Serving Website<\/strong><\/h2>\n

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    There are three ways to optimize your website for different devices. First, there is the responsive design which allows the user to access the website on the same URL serving the same HTML to all the devices and using CSS to render how content appears on each device. Google recommends using this method. Second, there is the dynamic serving website which serves the users the same URL for all devices but uses different HTML and CSS for each device. And the last one is when the website has a different URL than the mobile version (m-dot website).<\/p>\n

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    If you follow Google\u2019s recommendation, one of the first things you should do to align your website with the mobile-first index is to make it responsive<\/strong>. The interesting features of\u00a0responsive sites are the fact that they are a great fit for any device due to the sizeable adaptability and that they offer an optimized experience.<\/p>\n

    \"Responsive-website\"

    Source: developers.google.com<\/p><\/div>\n

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    Screen sizes changed from the traditional ones that we know, starting with desktops or notebooks, to phones, then tablets and e-readers. A responsive website must include some of the next elements:<\/p>\n