Mobile First Indexing Has Arrived! Are You Ready?

Google was on the verge of killing off any site that wasn’t mobile responsive last year, however this didn’t happen!

In fact, there were a few changes but nothing to make anyone overly concerned. The feeling that Google wasn’t letting it go wasn’t going away though and steadily their algorithm began to give mobile devices a few benefits over desktop orientated website designs. They trialled a few approaches to get the urgency across and many too the hint and went mobile responsive.

Now their algorithm appears to be making a more finite change to the way to views sites, they are beginning to roll out a mobile first indexing approach. That means they rank your site on mobile and on desktop by scrutinising the experience you deliver to the majority of web traffic – which is on mobile!

We monitor our clients consistently; the results below are Google Mobile rankings only.

So, what happened on the 17^th of October? Well, we know there was disruption to mobile rankings from the 4^th October, then every single mobile ranking keyword essentially disappeared from the index only to reappear on the 18^th October. Most of our sites triumphed from this mobile focus but there were some suffered on their Google mobile and desktop rankings.

It is not set-in stone where this algorithm update will settle because not all sites are part of the test so we only have a select cross section. But this is more activity than we have had for a while from Google, so we are anticipating substantial change with a mobile first approach.

The mobile first index update has been rolling out for months, so history suggests this update will continue to be gradual. It will prioritise your competitors who already have a mobile first setup however. Ensure you have a clean, user friendly, mobile site – or people will be encouraged onto better sites by Google moving forwards.