Mobile first indexing in SEO

Nowadays you might have heard a lot on Mobile-first indexing by Google. Google is constantly making efforts to make the web more mobile-friendly and reflect user behavior trends and the latest development from Google is  the Mobile-first indexing! 

It has certainly changed the way web development companies in Kochi create their websites and many conduct their SEO services in Kochi according to the present developments.  

What is this Mobile-first indexing?

It means Google predominantly uses the mobile version of the content for indexing and ranking. The mobile version of your website becomes the initial point for what Google includes in their index, and the baseline for how they determine rankings. Recent trends show that while monitoring the crawlbot traffic to your site, an increase in traffic from Smartphone Googlebot can be seen, and the mobile version of the page will usually be the cached versions of pages. 

Prior to this development, the index basically used the desktop version of a page’s content when judging the relevance of a page to a user’s query. As the majority of users now access Google Search with a mobile device, the Googlebot now primarily crawls and indexes pages with the smartphone version. Typically, if a site doesn’t have a mobile-friendly version, the desktop site can still be included in the index. But the lack of a mobile-friendly site could create a negative impact on the rankings of that site, and a site with a better mobile version would potentially receive higher rankings boost even for desktop searches. Mobile-first indexing can mean that the mobile version will be considered the primary version of your website. Hence if your mobile and desktop versions are equivalent and/or if you use responsive design there will not be a significant change in your search results.

It can be said this development amounts to a fundamental reversal in the way Google is thinking about your website content and how to prioritize crawling and indexation. Till now the desktop site was considered the primary version (similar to a canonical URL). The mobile site was considered as an “alternate” version for a particular use case. Google supported webmasters with a separate mobile site (m.domain.com) to implement switchboard tags (which indicated the existence of a mobile URL version with a special rel=alternate tag). Formerly Google might not even have made the effort to crawl and cache the mobile versions of all of these pages as they could simply display that mobile URL to mobile searchers. 

In practice the desktop site would be prioritized by SEOs and marketing teams as the most comprehensive version of a website. When the desktop version of the website came with full content, structured data markup, hreflang (international tags), the majority of back links etc., the mobile version might come along with lighter content, and/or not include the same level of markup and structure, as it would not receive the bulk of back links and external focus.

Now things have reversed! Hence it is always good to shift to mobile-first indexing for your website to rank higher in the Google rankings. Get in touch with us at Cedar Software Technologies a premier web development company in Kochi which is creating websites with mobile-first indexing to its esteemed clientele. 

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