Google Officially Announces the Rollout of Mobile-First Indexing

[Ryuzaki]

Shout out to @Prentzz for showing me this post:
https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2018/03/rolling-out-mobile-first-indexing.html

I'm going to be skeptical here and say, based on things I've noticed, they've been rolling this out for months now, even if they're only copping to it now. Of course they ran tests for a year and a half, as they say.

To summarize, the rankings have always been based on the desktop version of a page, which is how they'd render and do "above the fold" penalties and things like that. Now they want to switch their index over to mobile page designs, since desktop viewers do fine with mobile pages but mobile pages don't do fine with desktop pages.

This means they're not going to have a desktop index and a separate mobile index. They're going to have a mobile index only. Makes sense. You'll start to see the cache spitting back mobile designs, and they're giving Search Console notifications to sites that get "migrated." You can expect an increase in crawls from Smartphone Googlebot and a notification like this:

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So they render a thin width version of your responsive or adaptive designs. Or they pull the mobile subdomain, or they show the canonical AMP, or if you have AMP only for mobile then they use your non-AMP desktop version. If you have none of these, you're not going to have a good time. You can read about the best practices for mobile-first indexing here.

Here's the inevitable contradictions that we always get:

Sites that are not in this initial wave don’t need to panic. 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’s not yet gathered this way or desktop content. Moreover, if you only have desktop content, you will continue to be represented in our index.

So you're telling me that sites that are a better user experience for mobile won't outperform sites in the SERPs with no mobile version at all in a mobile-first index? Then why do this at all. And why say this in the very next paragraph:

Having said that, we continue to encourage webmasters to make their content mobile-friendly. We do evaluate all content in our index -- whether it is desktop or mobile -- to determine how mobile-friendly it is. Since 2015, this measure can help mobile-friendly content perform better for those who are searching on mobile. Related, we recently announced that beginning in July 2018, content that is slow-loading may perform less well for both desktop and mobile searchers.

If you watched the SERPWoo Volatility charts in the past few days while noticing a shakeup of traffic, you'll have picked this up ahead of time. I've been seeing the same amount of traffic if not slightly lower, but the intent is way different. I'm losing commercial-intent rankings and gaining a ton of nonsense long-tails.

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What's your take?

 

[CCarter]

To be honest - mobile has been here for a very very long time. Even all the default WordPress themes are mobile-friendly from the start.

From a user standpoint: there is very little excuse from not having a mobile-friendly website at this late date - at the very least the main website should be mostly mobile-friendly.

If you've got a simple site without complex functionality - you should be able to deliver a mobile version of your website at this late date.

From a SAAS developer standpoint: there are certain interface that are just impossible to code or properly function on a small screen. Having a completely functional mobile experience is extremely difficult. It will require you to strip down functions and features quite a bit and that adds a new layer of problems.

 

[bernard]

A good motivation to begin taking user experience and conversion on mobile seriously, if you wasn't already.

 

[Ryuzaki]

John Mueller of Google said that this is not the update that caused ranking shifts and that there was a separate update over the weekend, which we've already surmised.

But he did explicitly say in the Webmaster Central Hang-Out that this is, in fact, not the roll out, which does contradict the statements above and confirm my suspicions. This has been rolling out for quite some time, as indicated by the SERPWoo Volatility charts since January 1st:



The blue lines spiking throughout January and February indicate that they've been toying with this for months now, but it was definitely more than only this. Whatever it was shuffled commercial-intent rankings and is continuing to do so.

Anyways, John confirmed that they already had a big batch of sites already rolled over into the mobile first indexing and this "news" of the "real rollout" is actually phase 2 of them grabbing the next batch of sites.

He also indicates that nobody should notice any rankings changes and that this won't create a difference between those already moved into the mobile first indexing and those not. Believe what you want there. That's either flat out false or purposefully opaque to hide the other algorithm changes coinciding with this one.

 

[Andrewkar]

There is a lot of difference between mobile serp and desktop serp. Maybe it's not that noticeable in ENG part of the net, but in other areas when you have to deal with KWs consisting of "s" and "ś"? Believe me it makes a noticeable difference... It's easily noticeable if you deal with multi-language websites geared twords markets from different parts of the world, like for example east and west EU vs US/UK. US of course is up to 70% and sometimes more mobile, while east EU in the same niche could be at 50-60% mobile. Overall mobile is the king, but of course there are niches where desktop is the king, so whatreally matter is what we sell and who buys it.

Also, why no talk about image search? In some niches it's a very important traffic driver. Once I've done "hand analysis" of image search. I was checking image weight against positions in image search, and as you can imagine lighter images are on the top, and the fat ones are on the bottom. For this particular niche it turned out that if we want to rank high in image search, we have to size our images to around 50-70kb (and also keep this in mind all WP admins, redirects might screw your image positions - many plugins do this). So from my experience it's all about user experience. Mobile is first and is the future (in some niches that is).

 

[Samwise89]

Rather than make a new thread about it, I wanted to point out that Google has also rolled out a SERP change for the mobile index where there's no more pages, like ranking on page 1 versus page 2. There's a "Load More" style button that uses AJAX i guess to load more results onto the same page without reloading. It'll be interesting to see what this does to the click through ratings for the top positions.