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This week we reported how Google began sending out notices of sites moving to the mobile-first indexing process as part of the second batch of those sites it is rolling out to.
But with this batch, people are confused as to why some of the sites getting these notices are not mobile-friendly and smaller, less maintained sites. Why is Google moving over non-mobile friendly web sites to the mobile-first indexing process? The answer is pretty simple, if you think about it.
Desktop only sites are a single site, there is no problem with the desktop site not being equivalent to the mobile site – they are one site and thus, they have zero issues and are a good candidate for being switched to mobile-first indexing. Being mobile-friendly is not a requirement for moving to the mobile-first indexing process – they are two different things.
Yes, Google said they will not move sites that are not ready, but Google has a single index not a mobile vs desktop index, it is one index. We know the mobile first indexing will crawl desktop only site – that is something Google has said for a while. So those trying to avoid the mobile-first indexing by not being mobile-friendly makes zero sense, as we said before.
I asked John Mueller of Google about this at the 6:20 mark in yesterday’s webmaster hangout and John explained “desktop only is essentially kind of a unique form of a responsive design, right? It’s like the same design on mobile and on desktop so I I could certainly see our algorithms saying well nothing breaks when we switch the site over to mobile indexing, so might as well do it.”
John added, “it’s not that we’re specifically looking for sites that aren’t mobile-friendly. It’s it’s really just that this is probably one of the safe bets to start with and that’s that’s what we picked there to start with.” “Mobile first indexing is not mobile-friendly indexing,” John added. “So it’s not related to whether or not a site is mobile-friendly. It’s really just the indexing part that’s switching over to mobile and the friendliness aspect is something that’s still a ranking factor in the mobile search results but it’s independent of their indexing,” he explained.
Here is the video embed at the start time:
Here is the full transcript:
Barry Schwartz:
John Mueller:
Forum discussion at Cre8asite Forums and Google+.
