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New Search Rules: Google is Rolling Out Mobile-First Indexing

Amy Groden-Morrison

Google Is Rolling Out Mobile-First IndexingIf you’ve yet to build a great mobile version of your website, here’s a big incentive to do it: Google is rolling out mobile-first indexing, so it will use the mobile version of a site for indexing and ranking rather than the desktop version. That’s according the company’s official Google Webmaster Central Blog.

This is a bigger deal than you might realize. It means that if you’ve got a desktop version of a website and a mobile version of your website, and the mobile version is a slapdash affair, your Google search rankings will likely suffer. And if you have no mobile version, even though your desktop version will be indexed, your mobile search results will suffer. And both those things mean fewer visitors to your site.

Google didn’t take this step lightly. It’s been testing doing it for a year and a half. And it’s doing it because mobile searches on Google outnumber desktop searches. The blog explains that until this move, Google’s “crawling, indexing, and ranking systems have typically used the desktop version of a page's content, which may cause issues for mobile searchers when that version is vastly different from the mobile version. Mobile-first indexing means that we'll use the mobile version of the page for indexing and ranking, to better help our – primarily mobile – users find what they're looking for.”

Google recommends that webmasters check out Google’s developer documentation about how it determines the mobile content of a site. The documentation, Google says, “covers how sites using responsive web design or dynamic serving are generally set for mobile-first indexing. For sites that have AMP and non-AMP pages, Google will prefer to index the mobile version of the non-AMP page.”

Google says that if a site isn’t mobile-friendly or doesn’t have a specific mobile version, the desktop version will be indexed. But, the company notes, “we do evaluate all content in our index -- whether it is desktop or mobile -- to determine how mobile-friendly it is. Since 2015, this measure can help mobile-friendly content perform better for those who are searching on mobile.”

Mobile-first indexing is just being rolled out now. Google is notifying sites when they’ll be mobile-first indexed via Search Console, so check out that tool regularly. And if you don’t have a mobile-friendly or mobile version of your site — or if the one you have isn’t up to snuff — it’s time to get working on one.

If you’re looking for the best tool to build a mobile-friendly website and apps, consider Alpha Anywhere. It’s the top rated rapid mobile application development and deployment (RMAD) platform (on Gartner Peeer Reviews) and it lets you build  mobile or web apps/site using its unique "coding optional" low-code approach. Apps built in Alpha Anywhere can be self hosted or on the Alpha Cloud
Web/Mobile Development
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About Author

Amy Groden-Morrison
Amy Groden-Morrison

Amy Groden-Morrison has served more than 15 years in marketing communications leadership roles at companies such as TIBCO Software, RSA Security and Ziff-Davis. Most recently she was responsible for developing marketing programs that helped achieve 30%+ annual growth rate for analytics products at a $1Bil, NASDAQ-listed business integration Software Company. Her past accomplishments include establishing the first co-branded technology program with CNN, launching an events company on the NYSE, rebranding a NASDAQ-listed company amid a crisis, and positioning and marketing a Boston-area startup for successful acquisition. Amy currently serves as a Healthbox Accelerator Program Mentor, Marketing Committee Lead for the MIT Enterprise Forum of Cambridge Launch Smart Clinics, and on the organizing team for Boston TechJam. She holds an MBA from Northeastern University.

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The Alpha platform is the only unified mobile and web app development and deployment environment with distinct “no-code” and “low-code” components. Using the Alpha TransForm no-code product, business users and developers can take full advantage of all the capabilities of the smartphone to turn any form into a mobile app in minutes, and power users can add advanced app functionality with Alpha TransForm's built-in programming language. IT developers can use the Alpha Anywhere low-code environment to develop complex web or mobile business apps from scratch, integrate data with existing systems of record and workflows (including data collected via Alpha TransForm), and add additional security or authentication requirements to protect corporate data.

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