Google made significant updates for developers on mobile-first indexing!
How many of you have a site which is mobile or user-friendly? Having a mobile-friendly site is like hitting a bull’s eye. No matter how relevant content you produce but these are of no worth if your site ain’t mobile-friendly. Why am I focusing so much on the mobile-friendly sites? It is simple guys, this is the mobile-centric world, everyone has a phone which is like minicomputer for them. Most of us choose to open the site on our mobile devices than a computer or Laptops. And this is what determines the rank of a site. If you can’t give a better user experience, no one will visit your site and thereby major downfall in your site rank. Mobile becomes the starting point for Google to determine your site ranking. If you are aware of this then recently Google has made some significant updates for developers on “mobile-first indexing.”
In this article, I’ll walk you through the major updates that Google made in Mobile-first Indexing for developers. Before we move on to this let’s read the brief description of what mobile-first indexing is.
What exactly Mobile-First Indexing is?
As the term itself says, mobile-FIRST indexing, simply means Google looks at the mobile version of a page first, while determining how well it should rank. In other words, the mobile version will be considered the primary version when it comes to how rankings are determined. Google uses a mobile version of a page for indexing and ranking to better help our primarily mobile – users find what they’re looking for.
Furthermore, if a site doesn’t have a mobile-friendly version, the desktop site can still be included in the index, but the lack of mobile-friendly experience could impact negatively on the rankings of that site, and a site with a better user experience would greatly receive a rankings boost even for searchers on desktop.
What Google announced about the updates of Mobile-first indexing?
On 22 Jan 2020, Google made an announcement that it made “significant updates” to its developers’ documentation on mobile-first indexing. Here is the announcement of Google, “We made some significant updates to our developers’ documentation on mobile-first indexing, whether your site has been moved over already or not, it’s worth checking it out.”
List of updates of Mobile-First Indexing for Developers
Below given are the released updates of the mobile-first index for developers by Google. Let’s have a look at them:
- High-quality images
- Persistent images URLs
- Use supported video formats
- Same alt text for mobile/desktop images
- Don’t put the videos in the bottom of the page
- Resources must be crawlable
- Same meta tags (title, description)
- No interaction-based lazyload
- Same structured data on both versions
- URLs in Mobile structured data must point out to mobile ones
- Same meta robots
- Focus on having “same content” on Mobile Vs Desktop
Some of the best practices for separate URLs
- No fragment URLs for Mobile
- Mobile version shouldn’t give an error
- No one for many mobile URL
- Verify both versions Search Console
- Correct Canonical and Hreflang implementation
- Same robot.txt file
How you can improve your ranking with mobile-first indexing?
It’s important to know that Google gives points to websites who are mobile-friendly or responsive and must having mobile version features. For that you must get to know which things are required to optimize your website to improve Ranking with Mobile-First Indexing:
- Short images – you’re advised to upload short images on the site so that users can clearly watch it.
- Short videos – make sure videos uploaded on the site are not lengthy and must be short because long videos can take too much time and users don’t like it.
- Responsive design – you need to check whether your website design properly functioning or not on mobiles then run through it on Google Mobile-friendly tool.
- On-Page SEO – mobile phone doesn’t show full meta description and titles so make sure to write short meta description and title.
- Content – for mobile-friendly site short content is required because long contents are not visible on site. Try to produce content that is user-friendly to rank well.
Track Results!
As a website operator, make sure your site is mobile-friendly because having a mobile-friendly site means giving your site a boost in the rank because Google gives plus points to sites that are mobile-friendly. The latest updates of Google for mobile-first indexing are all about how you can achieve a good ranking of your site by following the recommendation of Google.
I have also explained to you how you can improve the rank of your site for the mobile-first index, just follow them and enjoy the results. For more updates get in touch with us till then keep reading.
