Google Announces Mobile-First Indexing

[Shaddows]

It's official
[webmasters.googleblog.com...]

To make our results more useful, we’ve begun experiments to make our index mobile-first. Although our search index will continue to be a single index of websites and apps, our algorithms will eventually primarily use the mobile version of a site’s content to rank pages from that site, to understand structured data, and to show snippets from those pages in our results. Of course, while our index will be built from mobile documents, we're going to continue to build a great search experience for all users, whether they come from mobile or desktop devices.

[Shaddows]

To my understanding, that isn't changing.

It can't "not change" - the updated index is to be built from the mobile version of pages.

Unless every site has one single version that is both mobile friendly and non-responsive, it is going to be indexed differently. In my experience, the number of pages that satisfy this condition is as close to zero as to be utterly negligible.

Every document in the index, therefore, is going to be different from the current document, for any given URL. Semantic, syntactic and structural differences will be impactful on their own, but then you have to consider that some sites have mobile-only (non-RWD) pages that may not have links at all. To my mind this could be the biggest dance since Mayday/Caffeine, possibly Florida (though I stress, for completely different reasons than either- they were ranking factor or IA changes, while this will be a total change of source material).

[EditorialGuy]

Additionally, many, many websites have modified nav on mobile. Which means your own semantic relationships will be affected, though obviously you retain control here.

Quite a few sites, including corporate megasites, have already modified navigation across the board, not just on mobile: e.g., by having little more than a three-dot "menu" symbol in lieu of top navigation, regardless of the device being used.

[engine]

Since the emphasis is mobile first, this requires a whole new approach, imho.
I mean, I'm looking at a mobile site that will work on desktop.

[EditorialGuy]

Since the emphasis is mobile first, this requires a whole new approach, imho.
I mean, I'm looking at a mobile site that will work on desktop.

Just don't fall into the "dumbing it down" trap, as so many others are doing.

And think about where your revenue (not just your traffic) is coming from. Although our information site's mobile traffic growth has been stunning and our desktop traffic has slipped, our desktop revenue is stronger than ever--and it continues to outstrip mobile revenue by a huge margin. It seems pretty clear to me that we'd be foolish to diminish the desktop experience, because--for the most part--desktop users are the visitors who pay the bills.

[engine]

Just don't fall into the "dumbing it down" trap, as so many others are doing.

Oh, you need not worry: I completely dislike the skimmed milk version of a mobile site, preferring the full fat milk.

No, what I mean is that if we are to follow the trend, all site development ought to be for a mobile first interface. For the first few years of mobile growth i was developing desktop sites and delivering some kind of mobile option (for example, responsive) up until last year. What i'm saying is we develop a site for mobile and then a desktop site, in effect swapping the UI process.

I'm not jumping on a bandwagon, it's the way forward. I just wish that it was going to be easier to fulfil as some sites don't particularly lend themselves to mobile.

As far as monetization is concerned, yes, mobile is proving to be much more difficult compared to desktop.
We just need to get on with it!

[pageoneresults]

I remember my first mobile friendly site back in 1995, it weighed less than 50k.

<table width="100%">
</table>

It's all about the viewport baby!

Senior Member from US

Do you have to remind me? :P

[Robert Charlton]

To catch up with the status of the mobile-first index...

Our Nov 2016 Google Updates and SERPs thread [webmasterworld.com...] reports major shakeups in the serps, old indexes returning temporarily, crawl errors reported in GSC, etc, beginning roughly November 10, 2016. I myself posted on Nov 11 that I thought it might be a mobile-first test. Other members are discussing a resemblance to Phantom. MozCast shows 106-degrees for that date.

Commentary I saw today from Glenn Gabe, who keeps a close watch on Google updates, and who has a lot more data than most of us do, suggested either a mobile-first test and/or a core ranking update....

November 10, 2016 Google Algorithm Update – Was It A Core Ranking Update, The Mobile-first Index Being Tested, or Both?
Nov 16, 2016 - by Glenn Gabe
[gsqi.com...]

Gabe noted....

...when checking pages that dropped across sites negatively impacted by the November 10, 2016 update, I saw a lot of mobile problems. That included popups, interstitials, render problems, UIs breaking, thinner and disorganized content on mobile urls, and more.

I should add, as I mentioned also in the Updates thread: "a mobile-first index is not in any way inconsistent with a deeper look at usability factors that a mobile index would entail." In fact, a deeper look at mobile usability is one of the key things I would expect.

It's also worth repeating here what Shaddows posted earlier in this discussion...

...To my mind this could be the biggest dance since Mayday/Caffeine, possibly Florida (though I stress, for completely different reasons than either- they were ranking factor or IA changes, while this will be a total change of source material).

Is anyone else seeing mobile-related changes yet?

[pageoneresults]

I am so out of touch with all the fancy algo names. But, I am in touch with detailed analytics for a local site that receives a respectable amount of visitors.

We have watched over the past 24-36 months as the mobile and tablet audience has slowly taken over the desktop audience in some instances. There are many that are right on the border of being predominantly mobile and tablet.

I'll share some statistics for the local website I reference above.

Since Jun 1, 2016 - 200,000 Sessions

• 53% – Desktop
  
• 37% – Mobile
  
• 10% – Tablet

Top 10 Viewport Widths out of 1,400

1. mobile – 360x640 – 13.70%
   
2. desktop – 1366x768 – 12.61%
   
3. desktop – 1920x1080 – 7.52%
   
4. tablet – 768x1024 – 7.26%
   
5. mobile – 375x667 – 6.86%
   
6. desktop – 1280x800 – 6.15%
   
7. desktop – 1440x900 – 5.83%
   
8. mobile – 320x568 – 5.14%
   
9. desktop – 1600x900 – 3.08%
   
10. desktop – 1280x1024 – 2.64%

As you can see from the above statistics, it's Mobile First.

[Wilburforce]

As you can see from the above statistics, it's Mobile First.

I think a lot will depend on your product/content and who your primary users are. If e.g. your primary user is accessing your site for personal rather than business reasons (or for somewhere to have lunch, rather than research) that is probably true. My own stats (last seven days) are:

Desktop - 62%
Smartphone - 27%
Tablet - 6%
Unknown - 4%
Phablet - 1%

which obviously doesn't say the same thing, but I would be wary about drawing conclusions from single cases or small samples.

Google probably have more data on the big picture than anyone else, so we can assume that - overall - mobile use is outstripping desktop use. However, the size and relevance of the desktop market to some webmasters will make a mobile-first policy very difficult to swallow.

[Robert Charlton]

Wilburforce and pageone... thanks for that information. A study that I'm looking forward to seeing is a comparison of time and engagement on each of the different platforms, for various types of sites and searches.

Anecdotal observation suggests to me that there's probably lots of inflation of mobile search numbers, with searcher behavior like...
- multiple voice searches to phrase a question well enough to be useful, some of which occurs while conversation about the search is also being carried on...
- lots of very fast scrolling, a surprising amount of which I understand from user-studies is absorbed, but during which I know that much is also simply skipped over...
- and that there's much more casual usage in the teenage market, which it seems to me would also change the stats.

In general, I'm assuming that mobile use is much more casual than desktop. I don't know when studies are going to start taking this into account, and how this might affect the weights of some factors in algos. If you're running a coffee shop or a department store, this casual usage might be more important, I suspect, than if you're a widget manufacturer.

Barry Schwartz did report very recently... perhaps with some tongue in cheek... that, after mobile-first search, Google anticipates "moving from mobile-first world to AI-first world. We want to build a personal Google for every user."

I'm seriously thinking that this may be how Google reconciles the various widely different patterns of usage on different types of sites.

For Barry's short article, see...

Google: We're Moving Search To An Artificial Intellegence First World
Nov 15, 2016 - by Barry Schwartz
https://www.seroundtable.com/google-search-ai-world-23000.html [seroundtable.com]


Algo naming...

I am so out of touch with all the fancy algo names.

pageoneresults... here's a quick top-of-my-head and probably superficial overview, where the names also provide a convenient history of what's led up to this new index.

- Phantom's got a refreshingly mysterious atmosphere to it, the kind of name I feel a secret algo should have. ;) As I understand it, the Phantom updates are core algorithm updates that are quality updates, and reports suggest that they're quality refinements, similar to Panda.

- "Mobile-first" is what we're discussing, and it's not just about load time. As I note above, it's about usability on mobile, and I'm thinking it's got to be assessing mobile quality factors more deeply than heretofore. It makes sense to me that this might involve something like Phantom.

- In mobile we also have mundane things like interstitial removal algos, whose names describe what they do... first going after the low-hanging fruit of mobile search problems.

- But on the naming front, Panda, Penguin, and Phantom I think are the big three named algos.

- I won't hazard a quick description of RankBrain and Hummingbird, except that they've both involved infrastructure changes and increased use of AI and machine learning for query refinement, including the processing of voice searches and conversational search patterns, as might be coming into more frequent use with mobile.

And RankBrain apparently is processing a very large percentage of all Google searches to some degree or another. These, together with the needs met categories into which Google is now slicing up searches, suggest that searcher intent, searcher location, task location, etc, are all going to factor into the new mobile-algo.

[Wilburforce]

We want to build a personal Google for every user.

Which, translated, means "we want to obtain personal information about every user and feed it to AI".

What's not to like?

[mack]

In reality, this is an evolution from "personalised search". In order to get to know a user, it needs to know lots of details about the user. Is this a good thing? Who knows, it's something not a lot of users will understand, but it's a data engineer's dream come true. As long as data is not abused I think it can be a good thing. I accept, there will be a lot of different opinions as to what "abuse" means.

Mack.

[Wilburforce]

As long as data is not abused

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

[Robert Charlton]

Mod's note: The dangers of personalized data is a large topic in itself, most definitely worth discussing, but it will completely derail this thread about Google's mobile-first indexing if we continue it here.

I think we've got a balanced enough snapshot here to sense the range of feeling. For those who wish to express their opinions about personalization further, please start another thread, phrased as a discussion, not as an editorial pro or con.

[Robert Charlton]

This is to note an update in Glenn Gabe's article [gsqi.com...] cited above on Nov 16, regarding what he saw as possibly a mobile-first test....

{Update: Saturday, November 19, 2016 – I saw reversals starting yesterday, November 18 (both recoveries and drops), which supports my theory that this was the mobile-first index being tested. I have provided more information below at the end of this post about what I’m seeing — including screenshots.}

This is consistent with a number of reports in our November Updates thread.

[seidelbast]

Now the question for many site owners with a separate mobile light version is what to do till the mobile first index hits.

In an ideal world, they would of course immediately start working on a new mobile version (or a responsive site) that has as much content and SEO power as the desktop version.

But unfortunately, this is not an ideal world, and I know several site owners that simply don’t have the resources to immediately open such a building site. In many SMEs, it was already difficult enough to convince senior management to allocate a budget for building a mobile version. Now getting back to them and telling them “sorry, but Google has changed its strategy and what did the job a few months ago will actually be counter-productive tomorrow” won’t necessarily result in a new budget.

What do you suggest to do with a mobile site m.site.com that doesn’t have all the content of site.com? (And if the site owner doesn’t have the budget either to build a new responsive site?)

How about applying a noindex tag to the entire mobile site but continue to redirect mobile users to the mobile version? Of course, you would lose the mobile bonus, but as you rightfully say in your post, this bonus is very small today. And certainly, not as significant as losing a lot of traffic when only the (light) mobile content get’s indexed.

If I get the currently available information right, Google will turn to the desktop version when it doesn’t have a mobile version in its index.

So why not hide this mobile content altogether and get only the desktop version indexed? (At least till a responsive site is available?)

What do you think?

[NickMNS]

@siedelbast, you may want to look at this from a different angle. More content does not necessarily equal better rankings. Your mobile site needs to target users on mobile devices and address their specific needs. Flooding a mobile page with massive blocks of text is not a great experience. I believe that when it comes to mobile, give users only what they need not more.

If your mobile site already does this, then your good to go, otherwise the problem lies with your site to begin with.

I have a responsive site where I hide a certain features for mobile users, because these features are not readable on a phone, the data is provided by other means (in tabular form for example). Over the past couple of weeks, I believe that Google has been testing this mobile index, because I have been seeing a boost from mobile users.

If you have to re-work your site, I would recommend a responsive design. If done correctly it provides great experience for all users and you will only have one code base to maintain.

[seidelbast]

@NickMNS Thank you Nick for your input which is very valid if one can start over.

The brutal reality is nonetheless that websites have a history. There were reasons why some have today a desktop version with a lot of content and a light mobile version with less content.

And many don't have the possibility to say "let's take a step back and think about what the user wants". When the news hit at the beginning of Nov, a lot of companies had already their marketing budget and strategy set for 2017. For many, especially those with small teams, it's not possible to say "we switch to a responsive design", they have neither budgeted for the time this takes, nor the money.

What's your take on working with the legacy website they have and making the best out of it?

Desindexing the mobile version (while still offering it to the user) seems to be a very low cost measure that could maintain both rankings and user experience.

Thoughts?