Google’s John Mueller said in a video hangout on Friday that Google has stopped automatically moving sites to the mobile-first indexing system. Instead, the last batch of sites are being queued up and will all be moved over sometime in the coming month or months.

He said the next time Google moves sites to mobile-first indexing it will likely be the last and then every site served by Google in its search results will be through mobile-first indexing.

Do not misunderstand, desktop only sites will be fine, but they will be indexed using a mobile useragent (like a mobile browser). The sites that will have trouble are sites that have different, less or broken content, links, schema, etc on the mobile version from the desktop version. But most sites, including your sites, are moved to mobile first indexing already.

It will be interesting to see if there is some sort of big rumble in the search results when Google moves over this last batch. I have no idea if it is 30% of the index or more like 5%, the last figure we have is that 70% of the results were already on mobile first indexing and that was back a year ago. So I assume maybe we are a lot less than 30% now but I do not know.

Google said it is going 100% into mobile-first indexing. Google moved the deadline from September 2020 to March 2021. Now, it might be March, might be April or even May John said but it will happen.

John Mueller said at the 45:27 mark into the video:

Here is the video embed at the start time:

Here is a bit more from John:

So maybe Google won’t do the last batch all at once, like he said in the video?

Forum discussion at YouTube Community.