The Complete Checklist for Mobile First Indexing
How SEO Will Be Affected by Mobile First Indexing
Since late 2016, a lot of buzzes has been going around in the SEO community about Google’s Mobile First Indexing. It will be by far the biggest change Google has ever made. In fact, they are literally flipping their algorithm in a 180.
Up until now, Google has always based ranking factors on the desktop version of the website. Mobile rankings began to differ only because Google would deduct rankings from sites that weren’t responsive. This was not a different index by any means.
But now, Google will be moving in the other direction now that mobile traffic has the internet’s traffic internet traffic. Google will be basing ranking factors on the mobile version of your website. Does this mean that we will all have to learn SEO all over again? Hopefully not, as Google has given us some tips:
Mobile and Desktop Version of Website Must Be the Same
If you have a site configuration where the primary content and/or markup are different, you need to change your website so that mobile and desktop are the same.
Make Sure Structured Markup is Implemented on Desktop and Mobile Version of Site
This is especially true if you are using the WordPress AMP Plugin. Keep in mind that the AMP pages are completely different pages than your responsive desktop/mobile pages. You’ll notice that on each page a text area exists where you can specify the AMP content. I suggest leaving it all the same. That’s what Google wants. You can test both versions using the Structured Data Testing Tool.
If you add the desktop version of your website to Google search console, be sure to add the mobile version as well.
It’s better for you to build up your mobile site and launch it when ready
If you are building a mobile version of your site, keep in mind that a functional desktop-oriented site can be better than a broken or incomplete mobile version of the site.
