Mobile First Index

[MichaelHayes]

Recently made this comment on another thread and figured it deserved its own thread.

What are your guys thoughts on the mobile first index?
From my understanding Google will use the mobile version of the site to dictate the desktop and mobile ranking of a site. I can see many cases where this would be fine, but for extremely large sites I think it could be an issue.
Large directory sites, for instance, or ecommerce sites that have specifications in the sidebar. Those are handy for internal linking and work well in the UI on desktop, but are very clunky in mobile, bordering on useless. You'd have to trim those back to give a good experience, but what happens to the link juice? Is everything hidden behind numerous hamburger buttons or stuffed at the bottom of the page?

Would love some feedback on this from the forum, since it has the workings of a major update, but doesn't quite make sense as to why they would do it this way.

 

[CCarter]

It's finally time folks... Google is going all in on mobile-first for ALL website September 2020. If at this late date you still have a slow mobile pagespeed score expect your traffic to tank severely in the next series of updates.

Last August (2019), a lot of sites that were not mobile pagespeed started tanking, I'm starting to think it's was a heads up - these updates since have always seemed to high non-mobile pagespeed optimized sites and rewarded ones that were fast on mobile - NOW we've got a hard deadline.

Announcing mobile first indexing for the whole web
Thursday, March 05, 2020

It's been a few years now that Google started working on mobile-first indexing - Google's crawling of the web using a smartphone Googlebot. From our analysis, most sites shown in search results are good to go for mobile-first indexing, and 70% of those shown in our search results have already shifted over. To simplify, we'll be switching to mobile-first indexing for all websites starting September 2020. In the meantime, we'll continue moving sites to mobile-first indexing when our systems recognize that they're ready.

When we switch a domain to mobile-first indexing, it will see an increase in Googlebot's crawling, while we update our index to your site's mobile version. Depending on the domain, this change can take some time. Afterwards, we'll still occasionally crawl with the traditional desktop Googlebot, but most crawling for Search will be done with our mobile smartphone user-agent. The exact user-agent name used will match the Chromium version used for rendering.

..

While we continue to support various ways of making mobile websites, we recommend responsive web design for new websites. We suggest not using separate mobile URLs (often called "m-dot") because of issues and confusion we've seen over the years, both from search engines and users.​

Source: https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2020/03/announcing-mobile-first-indexing-for.html

 

[c4yrslf12]

Honestly, I just can't believe it hasn't happened sooner. It's 100% necessary.

 

[bernard]

It's 100% necessary.

For webshops and ecommerce?

 

[CCarter]

For webshops and ecommerce?

Consumers are shopping on eCommerce platforms using mobile, so yes. It's a reality with Instagram ADs going directly to shopping sites for purchases.

Every single IG AD goes to a mobile optimized eCommerce site.

It might be difficult but it's 2020. If you aren't keeping up the competition definitely is.