From July 1, 2019 Googleswitched ‘mobile first indexing’ to ‘desktop first indexing’. More than half the world’s population -3.8 billion people- is online and of this, majority of the online users do the surfing through their mobile, smart phones and other portable devices. Also, the media consumption in mobile is 33% and that of TV is 34%. With the all the statistics in hand, it is only apposite for Google to switch from the ‘desktop first indexing’ to ‘mobile first indexing’.
We were in the epoch of desktops and computers till a few years ago. Owing to utility and portability of mobile devices and smart phones, a large population drifted to the ‘mobile index’ spectrum in recent years. Desktops and systems started getting circumscribed to office and personal usages. This conversion rate is the very reason why Google thinks it is more accurate to account for the results obtained from ‘mobile index’ rather than ‘desktop index’ to evaluate and rank domains in Google search statistics.
In 2016, Google had started experimenting with the mobile index based ranking. Google typically would crawl and index websites in the mobile version as well as desktop version to deliberate search results in its search engine. As more users started preferring mobile versions, Google presumed that the outcome will reflect in the search results done by them and hence started scrutinizing the ‘mobile index’ more.
For those domains that are recognized by Google and have desktop websites, there will not be any change. They will be under the ‘desktop first indexing’ only as their desktop version will be considered as mobile version. The smart phone’s display size will be the ‘adjusting gauges’ for such websites.
But what happens to new websites in the plot? Well, Google assumes that the newly launched websites are ready for this method of crawling. Also, Google announces that mobile first indexing will be enabled for such new and previously unknown to Google Search websites from July 1, 2019.
In addition, Google will notify sites that are migrating to mobile first indexing through Search Console. You might not know what Search Console is- Search Consoles are tools and reports that help you measure your search traffic and performance, fix issues and make your sites smart in Google Search Results. So for the major websites in Google, they will continue monitoring and evaluating pages for these websites’ readiness in converting to ‘mobile first index’ and once they are seen as being ready, Google will notify through ‘Search Console’.
Site owners can see the significant increase in crawl rate from ‘Smartphone Googlebot’ (a crawler program used to automatically discover and scan websites by following links from one page to another). Furthermore, Google will show the mobile version of pages in Search Results and Google cached pages.
Even though this new change that Google announced is relevant to web owners and web masters, the search results that Google users see from July 1 onwards are going to be from mobile friendly devices. It is expected that more appropriate search results will be available on mobile devices, no matter if the website searched for was from a mobile or a desktop.