On Nov 4, 2016, Google published in its Webmaster Central Blog in the post “Mobile-first Indexing” that most people use a mobile device to search on Google. However, the Google “Ranking System” would still base on the desktop versions of the websites. This would cause problems if the mobile sites contained less information than the desktop versions and users would not see the information they are looking for.

To make its offer more useful, Google has started some experiments to index the mobile websites first (“mobile-first indexing”).

Although these were still the first experiments Google had already issued some recommendations that still apply today.

Google published on March 26, 2018 in the article “Rolling out Mobil-first indexing” that after 1.5 years of careful experimentation and testing, the first websites that met the best practices for “Mobile-first indexing”, were migrated. The owners of these websites have been informed by Google via the “Google Search Console”.

Google informed on 19.12.2018 that a lot had already happened, but there was still a lot of work to be done. Once again, hints have been given for the improvement of mobile websites.

On May 28, 2019, Google announced that they would treat all new domains according to the “mobile-first indexing” principle from 1.7.2019. Internal analyses at Google had previously confirmed that all new websites would be ready for this.

With a date of 05.03.2020, Google announced in its “Webmaster Central Blog” that the entire Google index will be treated according to the “mobile-first” principle from September 2020.

As you can see, the entire issue has been a long process at Google. This is now to be completed after a small postponement in March 2021. Google published the postponement and other hints on optimizing mobile sites on 21.7.2020.

Author's Note

All website owners who have not yet changed their website in accordance with the Google Mobile-first Indexing initiative should now do so as quickly as possible. It is not long before March 2021.

Photos in this article:

Photographer unknown / Pexels

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