Google Announces Default Mobile-First Indexing for New Sites

Beginning July 1, 2019, Google says it will be enabling mobile-first indexing by default for all new, previously unknown to Google Search websites. And for other existing websites, Google will continue to monitor and evaluate pages for mobile-first indexing readiness.

“Our guidance on making all websites work well for mobile-first indexing continues to be relevant, for new and existing sites. For existing websites we determine their readiness for mobile-first indexing based on parity of content (including text, images, videos, links), structured data, and other meta-data (for example, titles and descriptions, robots meta tags). We recommend double-checking these factors when a website is launched or significantly redesigned.” – John Mueller, Developer Advocate, Google

Google recommendations: 

• Responsive web design for new websites, although it will continue to support responsive web design, dynamic serving and separate mobile URLs for mobile websites.
• Use a single URL for both desktop and mobile websites, because of the issues and confusion Google has seen from separate mobile URLs over the years, both from search engines and users.

According to Mueller, “Mobile-first indexing has come a long way… happy to see how the web has evolved from being focused on desktop, to becoming mobile-friendly, and now to being mostly crawlable and indexable with mobile user-agents!”

And at Red House, we can’t agree more. Considerations for responsiveness and mobile-first indexing have come a long way, and as always, we’ll continue to monitor advancements and changes as we move into the mobile-first future. 

To learn more, visit MarTech Advisor.