le completed its six-year-long process of switching to mobile-first indexing today.
Google began its efforts to migrate sites to mobile first indexing more than six and a quarter years ago. Google announced today that the efforts have now been completed and the final batch of mobile-first eligible sites has been moved.
Confirmation. John Mueller, from Google, confirmed that today is the last batch for Mastodon after I reported a large batch of sites had been moved to mobile first indexing within the past few hours. John said this was the “last bunch!”
Not all sites have moved. John said that there would still be “a tiny handful” of sites which “really don’t work well on mobile.” These sites will be “crawled with desktop Googlebot moving forward.”
Notifications. Today, SEOs noted that websites that were previously on desktop-first were notified that they had been moved to mobile first indexing. Richard Hearne shared this screenshot on Twitter.
History. Google began mobile-first indexing more than 6.5 years ago. After publishing deadline after deadline Google finally removed the deadline. Google introduced mobile first indexing in November 2016. By December 2018, the half of Google’s results were from mobile-first search. Mobile-first indexing is when Google crawls your website from a mobile browser’s perspective and uses that mobile version to index and rank.
Google announced in early march 2020 that the deadline for switching all websites to mobile-first indexing was September 2020. Google announced at the time that “To simplify things, we will be switching to mobile first indexing for all sites starting September 2020.” In July 2020, Google pushed this deadline back to March 2021.
Why we care. If your site is not mobile-first indexed, it may never be. All new sites should be mobile-first indexed by default. John explained that sites which were not migrated “doesn’t work at all with mobile user agents.”
The process took much longer than expected but it seems to have been completed.
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