Google Mobile-First Indexing Now Used For Over Half Of Google’s Search Results

Just about two years after Google announced their mobile-first indexing initiative, to crawl the web as a mobile device first versus crawling the web as a desktop device, Google hit a major mile stone. Over 50% of the search results Google returns globally are from Google crawling and indexing the web using mobile-first indexing.

Google’s John Mueller said on the blog post “There’s still a lot to do, but today, we’re happy to announce that we now use mobile-first indexing for over half of the pages shown in search results globally.”

Honestly, I am a bit surprised we are at over 50%. Keep in mind, this is not 50% of Google’s index, it is 50% of the search results they show when searchers go to Google.com and type in a query. That is a big difference.

Just to be clear, this site is not yet done over mobile-first indexing I suspect because we use dynamic serving and not responsive design. The mobile version of this site, at least in terms of navigation, is pretty different.

This site did not receive a notification in Google Search Console yet and I used the URL inspection tool and it clearly says crawled as “Googlebot desktop” yesterday:

In the blog post, Google discussed how to tell if your site is moved over to mobile first indexing. In short, you’d get a notification, you can use the URL inspection tool as I showed above, you can check the server logs, where a majority of the requests should be from Googlebot Smartphone.

Google also warns about being careful with missing structured data on mobile pages and missing alt-text for images on mobile pages.

Those two specific tips are given in Google’s blog post, likely for a good reason.

Congrats Google on making it to half way there in two years.

Forum discussion at Twitter.

This marketing news is not the copyright of Scott.Services – please click here to see the original source of this article. Author: barry@rustybrick.com (Barry Schwartz)

For more SEO, PPC, internet marketing news please check out https://news.scott.services

Why not check out our SEO, PPC marketing services at https://www.scott.services

We’re also on:
https://www.facebook.com/scottdotservices/
https://twitter.com/scottdsmith
https://plus.google.com/112865305341039147737

The post Google Mobile-First Indexing Now Used For Over Half Of Google’s Search Results appeared first on Scott.Services Online Marketing News.

source https://news.scott.services/google-mobile-first-indexing-now-used-for-over-half-of-googles-search-results/