On Friday, Google's John Mueller announced Google is doing away with the deadline for sites to switch over to mobile-first indexing. Some sites just can't move over yet and Google won't force them by giving them a deadline that it will continue to push off.
Google wrote "after analyzing the sites that are not yet indexed mobile-first, we've determined that some of these sites are still not ready to be shifted over due to various, unexpected challenges that they're facing. Because of these difficulties, we've decided to leave the timeline open for the last steps of mobile-first indexing."
In May we reported that mobile first indexing switch was not done yet and then in March we reported that Google was going to migrate over the last batch of sites to mobile first indexing soon. This was after moving the mobile first indexing deadline from September 2020 to March 2021. Well, Google is still not done moving some sites to mobile-first indexing, even at the end of November 2021.
John Mueller wrote "earlier, we thought that we could complete the move to mobile-first indexing by March 2021." Google said that "some sites were facing unexpectedly difficult challenges and we wanted to accommodate their timelines." Because of this, Google said it currently won't "have a specific final date for the move to mobile-first indexing and want to be thoughtful about the remaining bigger steps in that direction."
So the deadline is gone - no more!
I assume the remaining sites have a lot of issues migrating and Google could not encourage those sites to move. Google said it will "gradually to move those remaining sites over. If a website is not verified in Search Console, we won't be able to inform it of a pending switch to mobile-first indexing."
This process started five years ago and is still not done - pretty amazing. In March 2020, Google said about 70% of sites have been moved but we have not had an update on that figure in a long time.
I assume none of you have sites, that you care about, not yet moved to mobile-first indexing?
Forum discussion at Twitter.
