Google Clarifies Seven Points On Mobile-First Indexing After Much Confusion

Jun 15, 2018 - 8:23 am 5 by

Google Seven

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Let me start by saying all of these points, in my opinion, is something we've covered here before but the interesting thing is that Google felt these seven items are things SEOs who give presentations have confused over the past several months. Thus, Google has issued a clarification around how mobile-first indexing works and what it really means for webmasters.

Here is the seven point list really short:

(1) URLs: Google will show the mobile URL to those searching on mobile search and the desktop URL to those searching on desktop, if there are separate URLs. But Google will still only index it as a mobile device would see it.

(2) Crawl changed: The crawl rate and such should not change, although if you look carefully, you will probably see more crawling on your mobile pages over your desktop pages. There may be a temporary spike in crawl if Google needs to reindex everything.

(3) Cache bug: As we covered recently, there is a bug where the Google cache will 404 on pages that were recently moved to the mobile-first indexing process. It is a bug with the user interface and has no impact on crawling, indexing or ranking.

(4) Speed Update: Again, we covered this before, but the Speed Update coming next month is unrelated to the mobile-first indexing changes.

(5) Hidden/tabbed UI content: Again, covered numerous times, content in hamburger menus, accordions, tabs, expandable menus, etc on mobile work fine.

(6) Desktop sites: Desktop sites, non-mobile friendly web sites, mobile sites, responsive sites, all sites will eventually move to the mobile-first indexing process. It doesn't matter if you have a desktop only site, you will still be moved. In fact, we saw desktop only the first to move to mobile-first indexing.

(7) Ranking Boost: Yes, Google has a mobile-friendly ranking boost and that will stay, it has not changed. Going into mobile-first indexing does not change that fact. There is no additional ranking boost for being mobile-first indexing - there is for being mobile-friendly.

Again, non of this is new but Google felt the need to state these things again.

One thing Google should have added, as Pedro Dias mentioned would be number 8, that it is one index, the process of indexing is different, but it is a single index, not a separate mobile and desktop index:

Forum discussion at Twitter.

 

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