Google Begins Sending Out Mobile-First Indexing Notifications
Is your website ready for Google’s mobile-first index? If it is, you may have found a notification in your Search Console message center on April 30, 2018.
Many webmasters have reported that they received notifications that their website has been moved to the new Google mobile SEO index. While sites are just now beginning to see migration notifications in their Search Console, Google announced that it was starting to rollout the mobile-first index just over a month ago.
The body of the message reads:
Mobile-first indexing enabled for (Site URL)
To owner of (Site URL),
This means that you may see more traffic in your logs from Googlebot Smartphone. You may also see that snippets in Google Search results are now generated from the mobile version of your content.
Background: Mobile-first indexing means that Googlebot will now use the mobile version of your site for indexing and ranking, to better help our (primarily mobile) users find what they’re looking for. Google’s crawling, indexing, and ranking systems have historically used the desktop version of your site’s content, which can cause issues for mobile searchers when the desktop version differs from the mobile version. Our analysis indicates that the mobile and desktop versions of your site are comparable.
If you have yet to receive this notification in your Search Console inbox, don’t worry. While the switch to the mobile-first index is happening faster than many people expected, a full switch will still take a while to complete.
Want to know more about how you can ensure your website thrives in the constantly changing landscape of search? Contact the SEO and PPC marketing experts at Radd Interactive today!