What Is Mobile First Indexing?

[danni]

Right now, Google has just one index based on the desktop site. It creates signals based on Googlebot with the desktop user agent. Google then crawls with their mobile Googlebot to gather mobile friendly and other signals – but they aren’t creating a new index based on the the mobile site.

Currently, when a user searches Google (either desktop or mobile) the retrieval part of the algorithm looks at the desktop index created by the Googlebot desktop crawler. It finds relevant results based on the desktop index, then ranks them based on the desktop index and even shows the searcher a snippet based on the desktop index. The Ranker then looks at the mobile signals collected by the mobile crawler and adjusts the rankings accordingly.

This has caused some problems. There’s way too many cases where a user sees something in a snippet, clicks the results, gets redirected to the site’s mobile homepage (which probably spawns an app store or newsletter popup) and then realizes the content they saw in the search snippet isn’t available on the stripped down mobile version of the site. This is a bad user experience but it’s pretty much the norm on too many sites.

With this new change, Google seeks to stop that. The general theory (my words not Google’s or Gary’s) is that if the content isn’t important enough to be on your mobile site, then maybe you aren’t the most authoritative or relevant result for that content.

Source: Search Engine Journal