It has been a while since we talked about Google's mobile-first indexing initiative and the last we know is that over 50% of Google's index is built through mobile-first indexing. But since then, I haven't seen many notifications from webmasters of a new wave of mobile-first indexing migrations.
Google did tell us the last half will be hard so I asked Google's John Mueller about it and he said - they are making good progress and they are on track.
I asked John about this at the 29:57 mark into the video:
Barry: How far along are you or Google with the mobile first indexing? I know last time you said they were over 50% but it seems like a kind of pause from there, at least from the notifications going out.
John: We’re moving. So it's a tough problem. So it's coming step by step. I suspect at some point we'll have some more announcements on the next steps that we've taken and where we're headed from here. In general, I think that the team is on track here and we're seeing that a lot of the web is really ready for mobile first indexing, which is kind of reflected in that over 50% of the sites that we show have switched. So that's I think overall really good sign.
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Just so you know, Google announced this initiative around two and a half years ago. It took them two years to get half of their index to be pulled with mobile-first indexing. Google said the next half will be harder. But it doesn't sound like the next batch will have to wait another 2 years to make more progress, despite the next half being the harder batch.
We will see - but it sounds like we should hear something soonish from Google on the topic.
Here is the video embed at that start time:
Forum discussion at YouTube.
