Barry Schwartz says, “Google has begun testing its mobile-first index, which will primarily look at the mobile version of your website for its ranking signals and fall back on the desktop version when there is no mobile version.

We expected this was coming and even heard about it over a year ago, but this is the first time Google has posted details about the mobile-first index on their own blog.

Most of Google searches are mobile, but Google’s index is desktop

Google explained that it sees more mobile searches than desktop searches on a daily basis. But when Google looks to evaluate a page’s ranking in Google, it currently looks at the desktop version of the site — an issue we pointed out over a year ago. To fix this, Google will look at the content, links and structured data of the mobile version of your site if one is available.

Google wrote:

To make our results more useful, we’ve begun experiments to make our index mobile-first. Although our search index will continue to be a single index of websites and apps, our algorithms will eventually primarily use the mobile version of a site’s content to rank pages from that site, to understand structured data, and to show snippets from those pages in our results“.

Google begins mobile-first indexing, using mobile content for all search rankings

Search Engine Land

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