Google’s revised mobile-first indexing deadline is coming up in the next several weeks. Google said it is going 100% into mobile-first indexing. Google moved the deadline from September 2020 to March 2021. John Mueller of Google said today the March 2021 is an approximate deadline.
John was asked if all sites will be moved over by April 1, 2021. John said on Twitter “That’s approximately the target. We don’t have a critical reason to reach any particular cut-off date, so it could be that the remaining sites are a bit spread out, some earlier, some a little bit later.”
So some may be moved over 100% prior to April 1, 2021 and some may lag behind and move over after April 1, 2021.
Here are those tweets:
If a site is moved to mobile-indexing and it has these issues, the site’s rankings in Google can and most likely will change – maybe for the worse.
Here is the abbreviated list from Google that you should double check between your desktop version and mobile version of your site:
Robots meta tags on mobile version
Lazy-loading on mobile version
Be aware of what you block
Make sure primary content is the same on desktop and mobile
Check your images and videos including
Image quality
Alt attributes for images
Different image URLs between desktop and mobile version
Video markup
Video and image placement
You can read Google’s full post on this over here.
So be prepared, which I expect most of you are and most of your sites are already moved over to mobile-first indexing. But if not, be prepared.
Forum discussion at Twitter.