It has been just shy a year since Google first announced their mobile first index initiative, where they would crawl the web from a mobile perspective first. Well, it seems Google has started, at least on a really limited basis, to start indexing some sites from a mobile first view.

John Mueller from Google, after a bit of arm twisting, somewhat confirmed it yesterday in a webmaster hangout. “It’s possible that for individual sites we were kind of already indexing the mobile version but it’s probably like a really small number,” John said. John Mueller added ” I wouldn’t see that as saying like we’ve started with this but it’s more kind of still in the experimental stage,” which is his way of saying – no, we didn’t not officially officially start the mobile first indexing.

But it is out in the wild and over the past week or so many tools and webmasters have taken notice to major mobile ranking shifts in Google. We know Google plans on rolling this out slowly, in batches of sites, as to make sure the search results don’t shuffle too much.

The conversation between myself and John started at the 51:56 mark into the video. But at the 53:52 mark I kind of dig more to get him to explain what he was saying and then by 54:30 he talks about there was not an “official batch” but some limited number of sites may have been switched over already.

Here is the full video embed at the start of the 51:56 mark, watch it to see:

Here is the transcript:

So it seems Google has indeed started to move some sites/pages over to the mobile first indexing process but is not ready to say it is official until Gary Illyes finishes his blog post and they make it more official.

Forum discussion at Google+.