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Starting earlier this week, Google began sending out tons of mobile-first indexing notices to webmasters. In fact, as I write this, I received a few more notices foe web sites I have verified in Google Search Console. We've covered the first several batches of mobile-first indexing notices in the past and skipped many in between. But this last batch, which has been ongoing for the past few days, is one of the largest batches out there.
In fact, even my corporate site, RustyBrick.com was moved over and it is one of those fancy mobile-friendly web sites. Prior, mostly sites that were not mobile-friendly were first moved but now, even mobile-friendly sites are being moved. I covered the topic here a ton so I am not going to rehash everything we've covered in the past.
Here is a screen shot of the notices I got recently, keep in mind, a bunch more came in between when I screen captured it and now:
Here is the text of the alert:
Mobile-first indexing enabled for https://www.rustybrick.com/To owner of https://www.rustybrick.com/,
This means that you may see more traffic in your logs from Googlebot Smartphone. You may also see that snippets in Google Search results are now generated from the mobile version of your content.
Background: Mobile-first indexing means that Googlebot will now use the mobile version of your site for indexing and ranking, to better help our (primarily mobile) users find what they're looking for. Google’s crawling, indexing, and ranking systems have historically used the desktop version of your site's content, which can cause issues for mobile searchers when the desktop version differs from the mobile version. Our analysis indicates that the mobile and desktop versions of your site are comparable.
Here are some tweets related to this batch from Googlers or retweeted by Googlers:
A common misconception is that mobile-first indexing is related to mobile-friendliness -- they're completely independent. If you have that many sites verified (luckily there's a 1k limit :)), I'd just mute that message.
— 🍌 John 🍌 (@JohnMu) September 19, 2018
If a site has shifted to MFI and removes content from the mobile version, we'll continue to just index the mobile version. If the content isn't there anymore, well, it won't be in the index anymore either.
— 🍌 John 🍌 (@JohnMu) September 20, 2018
We don't have any plans for switching sites back & forth, doing a relaunch with a non-mobile-indexable site would be a bit ... unfortunate :)
— 🍌 John 🍌 (@JohnMu) September 20, 2018
Just a reminder...if you have been moved to mobile first indexing, your Google cache page is probably broken. This is an issue on Google's side and not a problem with your site. No need to worry. pic.twitter.com/OXfd0yLolD
— Marie Haynes (@Marie_Haynes) September 19, 2018
All of this we covered before but hey - summed up in tweets helps.
Forum discussion at Twitter.
