Google's John Mueller said he thinks, and he said he might be wrong, that the final mobile-first indexing batch will be done in the next couple of months. Desktop indexing is not going away, and it will be used for "a tiny number of sites," John added on Twitter. This process started over six years ago.
In November 2022, John said the last batch of mobile-indexing is coming soon. Before that, he said that the last batch would be in July 2022 but then in August said they were not done. As a reminder, Google started its mobile-first indexing initiative over six years ago, in November 2016. But we still have sites that are being migrated over from Google desktop-first indexing to mobile-first indexing at the end of 2022.
Yes, last November, Google removed any deadline they had for the mandatory mobile-first indexing switchover. As a reminder, in May 2021, 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.
Google is still not done moving some sites to mobile-first indexing, even into 2023.
Here are the new tweets from John on this from yesterday:
I'm tempted to say the next couple of months, but I've given up on trying to predict the future :-)). The plan is also that a tiny number of sites will remain with desktop indexing, because they just don't work at all with mobile crawling.
— johnmu is a ranking factor and so are you 🐀 (@JohnMu) February 12, 2023
But again, desktop indexing won't be 100% gone. John said that even when all sites are migrated to mobile-first indexing, there will be a tiny number of sites that will remain on desktop indexing.
Forum discussion at Twitter.
