Mobile-first indexing: Google makes its new crawling method official

The official Google blog has just announced what many of us already suspected: that the search engine's crawling and indexing system will value the mobile version of websites much more than the desktop version when crawling. Google calls this "Mobile-first indexing." According to the article, the research and work carried out by the California platform has taken more than a year and a half until they have officially determined this new variation in the website review system. One of the main reasons that led them to make this decision is that a large proportion of websites still do not use a responsive system , that is, self-adaptive, but rather create one site adapted to mobile and another adapted to PC without canonicalizing both, and therefore suffer from what is known as "duplicate content." In its eagerness to make things as easy as possible for users, and according to the most recent studies, a high percentage of users browse the web using their mobile devices, Google has therefore made this new decision.

All webmasters will receive notification of Mobile-first indexing through Google Search Console.

According to Google engineer Fan Zhang , a single index of results will continue to be maintained and not two separate ones, so the indexed versions will both be as they have been shown to date, but the search engine will determine the mobile version as the first option when launching its bots and the one it will take as initial to assess its positioning. All webmasters should receive a notification through the Search Console in which we are informed of the process that Google has called Mobile-First and we will also be able to notice a significant increase in indexing and work of the Bot in the Smartphone version. Another important change is that it will also prioritize the mobile version in the cache results that the search engine offers when a website no longer exists or we want to see a previous edition. Last, but not least, of the changes that this new step by the search engine entails is that it will prioritize responsive content or the mobile version of the website over AMP results and will index it first, which represents a complete turnaround in its strategy for mobile phones since just a few months ago AMP seemed to be the future of mobile versions.

As always, Google warns that its Mobile-first indexing will be implemented with plenty of time and margin before the changes take effect and affect websites.

Fan Zhang also tells us that this change primarily affects the way Google works when collecting data and not so much how it displays it, but we already know that whenever the almighty search engine makes a change, the foundations of SEO are affected. Zhang takes advantage of the message to confirm that in July, any page that is not properly optimized and relatively fast will be affected in its positioning. In short, how will this change really affect us? Well, initially, and according to the article itself, the impact is on the way Google takes information from a website and not so much on the display of results. However, it is true that if the website does not have a mobile-adapted version and only has a desktop version, it will end up harmed, just as if the mobile version is poorly adapted or does not meet the search engine's standards. In the long run, it will be affected in positioning, since Google has been facilitating and warning since 2015 that its intention is for mobile versions of websites to be the primary focus. Throughout 2018, Google has made several interesting changes, and this certainly won't be the last. They've also announced via email that their Insights service will be integrated into the new AdWords interface, requiring users to create a profile to use the tools. This is similar to what happened with their Keyword Consultant. If you have a website and still don't know or understand the importance of optimizing for mobile SEO, we'll explain it to you in this article. We'll be keeping a close eye on future developments.