Google Now Relies on Mobile-first Indexing for New Websites

Google is making a nice change to Google Search this July. The company today announced that it will now be using mobile-first indexing for all new domains by default.

The company first announced mobile-first indexing back in 2016. The idea behind the system is that there’s a smartphone Googlebot that indexes your sites how a user sees it on a mobile device. And that makes a lot of sense as most web sites now have responsive designs and display the same content on mobile devices and desktops.

Windows Intelligence In Your Inbox

Sign up for our new free newsletter to get three time-saving tips each Friday — and get free copies of Paul Thurrott's Windows 11 and Windows 10 Field Guides (normally $9.99) as a special welcome gift!

"*" indicates required fields

This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.

Google has been testing the smartphone Googlebot for a long while, and it’s been slowing rolling it out. And it seems like mobile-first indexing might soon be the default for all sites. “Mobile-first indexing has come a long way. We’re happy to see how the web has evolved from being focused on desktop, to becoming mobile-friendly, and now to being mostly crawlable and indexable with mobile user-agents! We realize it has taken a lot of work from your side to get there, and on behalf of our mostly-mobile users, we appreciate that,” the company said.

If you are a web developer and want to check whether your site is being crawled by the smartphone Googlebot, you can do so from the URL Inspection Tool in Search Console. Google says the company will continue to look into the performance of the new mobile-first indexing and make changes accordingly going forward.

Tagged with

Share post

Please check our Community Guidelines before commenting

Conversation 5 comments

  • skane2600

    28 May, 2019 - 3:15 pm

    <p>Is it really true that most web sites have responsive designs? I must be visiting the wrong sites.</p>

    • digiguy

      Premium Member
      28 May, 2019 - 4:30 pm

      <blockquote><em><a href="#431031">In reply to skane2600:</a></em></blockquote><p>no, most sites do not have responsive designs. At best, most big websites do…</p>

    • wright_is

      Premium Member
      29 May, 2019 - 1:26 am

      <blockquote><em><a href="#431031">In reply to skane2600:</a></em></blockquote><p>I'd say around 20% of the sites I visit are responsive. Most are designed for business and developers and expect a big screen – which is fine by me, I do 98% of my browsing on a big screen.</p><p>Larger companies' corporate presence is usually responsive these days, but a lot of technical information is on old-style web sites.</p>

  • Lordbaal

    28 May, 2019 - 4:31 pm

    <p>You may want to talk to the developer of this site. It is not mobile responsive on my iPad mini.</p>

  • mr shado

    19 July, 2019 - 1:50 pm

    <p>To know mobile ko Hindi mein kya kehte hain <a href="https://www.sochtalk.com/2019/07/mobile-ko-hindi-me-kya-kehte-hain.html&quot; target="_blank">CLICK HERE</a> </p>

Windows Intelligence In Your Inbox

Sign up for our new free newsletter to get three time-saving tips each Friday

"*" indicates required fields

This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.

Thurrott © 2024 Thurrott LLC