What Is Mobile-First Indexing And How Does It Affect SEO?

Rohit Mehta
4 min readFeb 25, 2021

Recently, a new SEO update is being given importance by Google, which we know as Mobile-First Indexing. Not long ago, Google has included Mobile-First Indexing in its new update to make any website more mobile-friendly so that it can understand the behavior of users.

If someone is a blogger or has a website, then he should know about this new update of Google Mobile-First Indexing. Mobile number of mobile users is increasing at a faster pace than before and if we talk about internet users, more than half of people use internet on smartphones and tablets compared to those who use internet on desktop.

This is also because smartphones or tablets are very user friendly to use internet as compared to desktop, according to a data, by the end of last year about 80% of internet traffic was accessed from mobile. So now we can understand very easily why Google is giving more importance to mobile updates.

In this article today, we are going to tell you about Mobile-First Indexing, in today’s time, only creating a mobile-friendly website does not work but at this time, people are able to make better decisions because of mobile internet. To understand it better, let’s start our article today.

What is Mobile-First Indexing?

If understood simply, Mobile-First Indexing means to create a website that is very mobile friendly so that users can access that website very easily on their smartphone. After studying the data of the users, Google realized that many users prefer to run internet from their mobile instead of desktop.

Due to which the websites are mobile-friendly, all users get a very good browsing experience, and for this reason, all such websites are indexed by Google very soon. If we monitor the Crawlbot traffic of our website, then we can easily understand how much the traffic of smartphone Googlebot has increased and most of the cached versions of web pages are in the mobile version, which is why they are called Mobile-First.

Whenever our website does not have a mobile-friendly version, it has a negative impact on our website ranking. Any website that has a good mobile experience, the same website gets a good ranking boost. If both the mobile and desktop versions of our website are the same, then if you have optimized the content for the mobile version as well as you use a responsive design, then such a change in search results will not have much impact on the performance of our website.

Until recently, the desktop version of a website was seen as the primary version, while the mobile version was seen as an alternate, but not now because Google motivates webmasters to implement a different mobile site. . Google now starts showing the website URL directly in mobile searchers, not by crawl and cache the mobile version of the web page of our website.

Why Mobile-First Indexing was implemented?

Announcing Mobile-First Indexing by Google is a very important thing because this change will change the process of creating our content and optimizing them in the future. According to Google, at the present time, Mobile Traffic has left desktop traffic far behind.

We understand very well that the basic principle of Google is to provide absolutely accurate information to any user according to the search conducted by them in a well-curated form. Google always tries to show the users with perfectly optimized images, that too with high speed, apart from that the text formatting of the web page should be such that no one has any problem while accessing it.

For this reason, Google always tries to show every content quickly and effectively, and this cannot be done by simply indexing the desktop website as most of the internet traffic is currently through mobile. If the content is visible only on the desktop, then users will have a very poor experience, maybe users have to search for another search engine that Google never wants.

But it is not at all like that you need to discontinue the desktop version, but Google is not going to Mobile Indexing in every way, so if you are a blogger, then you have to adopt Mobile-First Index, but also release your desktop version.

What to do for Mobile-First Indexing?

It is not at all that Mobile-First Indexing has started completely, but these changes of Google are in their initial form i.e. Testing Mode, then you do not need to be afraid or upset for this. This new update from Google will initially target only those websites that Google thinks are ready.

To get your website mobile-first indexing, you have to pay a little attention to your website, let’s know what we can do.

  • Structured Data — We should use the same structured data in both versions of our website i.e., Mobile & Desktop version. Our structured data requires the mobile version of the URL of our website, in addition, we should not include unnecessary structured data in our website.
  • Content- In the mobile version of our website, the content should be of high-quality and high-value in the same way as the desktop version of our website. It includes text, images, and videos, so the mobile version of our website has formats crawlable and indexable.
  • Metadata- It should always be noted that all the titles and meta descriptions of the blog on the website should be parallel to each other and should be in the mobile and desktop versions of the website.

हिन्दी में पढ़ने के लिए यहाँ क्लिक करें (Click Here To Read In Hindi)

Originally published at https://www.digitalgabbar.com on February 25, 2021.

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Rohit Mehta

Rohit Mehta is an Indian blogger-cum-Journalist, author and entrepreneur. He owns a blog named Digital Gabbar which is Available in English & Hindi.