Barry Schwartz says, “Google has started slowly rolling out the mobile-first index to a small subset of users, and we have published a large list of FAQs around the mobile-first index.

But one somewhat shocking item I learned yesterday was that Google, by default, won’t use the AMP version of your page for the mobile index, even if you do not have a mobile-friendly alternative.

For example, you have a website that is only desktop-friendly, i.e., there is no mobile-friendly version, but you decide to skip mobile-friendly and go directly to building AMP pages for your site. So now you have a desktop version and an AMP version of your website. AMP is super mobile-friendly, it is super-fast, and it is specifically designed for mobile.

In the case above, Google said they will not use the AMP version in the new mobile-first index; instead it will pick your desktop version. You can force Google to use AMP in this case, but you need to use a rel alternate attribute to force it. But by default, Google will pick your desktop version for the mobile-first index”.

Google may pick desktop over AMP page for the mobile-first index

Search Engine Land

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