Website developers who are looking for a lead placement in Google search results, will now have to ensure that they have a mobile-compatible platform. With the hike in number of smartphone users throughout the globe, the search engine has recognized the necessity of prioritizing those who access the web through handsets.
Google has been working on the test-run of this feature for a year, and is now moving to the implementation stage. It now follows a ranking style based on the desktop designs of websites which is to be replaced by a strategy that decides the visibility of the website on search result list on the basis of its mobile version.
Google terms this revised method as “mobile-first indexing”, and has stated that a team is functioning on analysing content from mobile versions of websites and which would appear on top of a distinct search.
According to Google webmasters blog post, “crawling, indexing, and ranking systems typically look at the desktop version of a page’s content, which may cause issues for mobile searches when that version is vastly different from the mobile version. Mobile-first indexing means that we’ll use the mobile version of the content for indexing and ranking, to better help our – primary mobile – users find what they are looking for.”
The company has also listed out certain pointers that would explain the terms by which mobile-first indexing is done:
- The mobile version of a website is expected to have similar premium quality content as the desktop version.
- Both versions should have structured data and metadata tags/ descriptions.
- In the case of a separate URL used for the mobile version of a site, changes are not mandatory.
Google will take on the change on a slow pace, providing ample time for the site owners to modify their pages accordingly. If you would like to check mobile compatibility of your site. Click here.
