We know the Google mobile-first index isn’t launching any time soon and there were rumors it won’t go out in 2017 because hitting quality neutral has been a harder thing to achieve than they once thought.

Gary Illyes from Google said in the mobile-first panel at SMX Advanced yesterday that it is now likely not going to launch until 2018. Gary said we are “many quarters” away from a launch. In fact, John Mueller recently said they might even launch it in batches. I even asked and pushed for a sandbox preview but was denied again.

Matt McGee at Search Engine Land has an excellent write up on it.

Here are some tweets from the attendees:

Forum discussion at Twitter.