Search giant Google has announced this week that it would be rolling out its “mobile-first” indexing of the web. Google’s decision came in after it tested and experimented the search indexing for a year and a half. The search giant, in 2016, has revealed its plan to impose changes on how search index works.

 

This further explains how the algorithm works on mobile while opening the web index of a website. The experiment, according to Google, attempts to understand how data is being structured and how snippets are shown from various sites to Google search results.

 

What is Google’s mobile-first indexing?

 

“To recap, our crawling, indexing, and ranking systems have typically used the desktop version of a page’s content, which may cause issues for mobile searchers when that version is vastly different from the mobile version,” Google said in its official blog.

 

Also, Google pointed out that using its mobile-first indexing, it would use “the mobile version of the page for indexing and ranking, to better help our – primarily mobile – users find what they’re looking for.”

 

 

“We continue to have one single index that we use for serving search results. We do not have a “mobile-first index” that’s separate from our main index. Historically, the desktop version was indexed, but increasingly, we will be using the mobile versions of content,” the search giant added.

 

As early as December 2017, the search giant had started to transition several websites to mobile-first indexing. Google, however, declined to point the properties that were move. Fast forward this year; Google said it would encourage webmasters to make mobile-friendly websites.

 

“We do evaluate all content in our index — whether it is desktop or mobile — to determine how mobile-friendly it is. Related, we recently announced that beginning in July 2018, content that is slow-loading might perform less well for both desktop and mobile searchers,” Google said.