Google announced that the deadline for switching to a fully mobile-first index has been cancelled, and there is no final date for the switch. The final switch to mobile-first indexing was postponed to accommodate the remaining sites that have not yet been updated to the mobile-friendly version.
Google Mobile First Index
The mobile-first index is intended to be a web index suitable for mobile devices for ranking purposes and search related functions (such as snippets).
The reason for moving to mobile-first indexing is to better serve the majority of Google search users who primarily use mobile devices to access Google.
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One of the problems Google is solving is displaying search results from websites whose desktop versions are very different from the mobile versions shown to searchers on mobile devices.
“…Our ranking system usually still looks at the desktop version of the page content to assess its relevance to users.
When the mobile page has less content than the desktop page, this can cause problems because our algorithm does not evaluate the actual page seen by the mobile searcher. “
The original idea was to completely move website indexing and page ranking to 100% mobile-friendly documents instead of using the desktop version of content for ranking and indexing.
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However, the goal was temporarily shelved, and according to Google, the timetable has not yet been determined.
The date of the switch to full mobile-first indexing is March 2021. However, that date has come and gone.
Google cancels mobile priority switching date
A new Google blog post (written by John Mueller) announced that the final date for the switch to a 100% mobile-first search index has been put on hold, basically canceling the publication target date for the switch.
The announcement stated:
“.. After analyzing mobile-first sites that have not yet been indexed, we determined that some of them are still not ready to transfer due to various unexpected challenges.
Due to these difficulties, we decided to keep a timeline for the final step of mobile-first indexing.
…We think we can complete the transition to mobile-first indexing by March 2021. However, we found that some websites are facing unexpected difficulties and challenges, and we hope to adapt to their schedule.
We currently do not have a specific final date for mobile-first indexing, and hope to consider the larger steps remaining in this direction. “
Google site index changes?
Google’s index has recently become news and a topic of concern and discussion on social media. People think that Google’s index has changed.
The search marketing community has been paying attention to the search index in the past month. Many people have shared that it is becoming more and more difficult for Google to index content. The data shared by search marketers from all over the world seems to prove Google is indexing less and less content.
Bing announced a new crawling protocol called Index now This is expected to change the way web pages are discovered and indexed.Google subsequently announced that they would Research whether there are any benefits to adopting the new IndexNow Crawling and indexing protocol.
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Mobile-first search index postponed
It seems that Google currently has no clear plan to switch to a fully mobile-first search index. Google did not share statistics on how many websites have failed to develop a network that is suitable for mobile devices, but for Google, in the process of moving to mobile-first indexing, the number of people who resist leaving these websites behind must be quite large.
