Mobile First Indexing for Unfriendly Site

[Rlilly]

Not the most interesting topic but our one site which is totally unfriendly on Mobile got notification that it was now "Mobile First Indexing Enabled"

Perhaps another example at how much Google is disorganized.

[tangor]

Mine arrived this morning. Same message. However the site it named does not have a viewport on it (yet), so how can that be?

[goodroi]

IMHO it might be more an example of how the SEO industry can be disorganized and unprepared for change.

Mobile first indexing will eventually be rolled out to all sites including sites that refuse to become mobile friendly. Google has been talking about this for a long time. They have been slowly rolling this out on their own schedule which has actually helped some procrastinating webmasters.

I would not suggest any webmaster procrastinate much longer if they want their website to be first and not held back.

[NickMNS]

Perhaps another example at how much Google is disorganized.

How is that? It is a notification informing you that going forward your website is now being indexed and ranked based on the mobile version. Given that your site is not mobile friendly your ranking will surely be negatively impacted, if it hasn't been already. Good luck.

[Rlilly]

@NickMNS - I assumed that only Mobile Friendly sites would be in the Mobile First index. The site has not been negatively impacted, it even receives snippets on the smartphone for some searches. Granted, its in a B2B business in a niche area so there are not a huge amount of searches.

We launching a responsive site in a week or so, i will be interesting to see if there is any effect on SERP postioning.

[NickMNS]

I assumed that only Mobile Friendly sites would be in the Mobile First index.

The switch to a mobile first index was a switch for all websites mobile and not. Here is the link to Google's announcement on the topic:
[webmasters.googleblog.com...]

...currently our crawling, indexing, and ranking systems typically look at 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 content for indexing and ranking, to better help our – primarily mobile – users find what they're looking for.

[Wilburforce]

I assumed that only Mobile Friendly sites would be in the Mobile First index.

That seems to me to misunderstand what Mobile First Indexing means. If the phrase (Mobile First Indexing) isn't self-explanatory, Google makes it fairly clear ([developers.google.com ]) that it refers to which version of a site/URL is indexed, and where there is only a single version it will make no difference.

How sites are ranked (and how mobile-friendliness affects this) is a separate question, but if your site isn't mobile-friendly then you should make it so as a matter of high priority,

[Wilburforce]

@NickMNS - my post crossed in the post with yours, but the Googleblog statement ("we'll use the mobile version of the content for indexing and ranking") is potentially misleading: if it isn't indexed, it won't be ranked, so where there are two versions, only the mobile one will appear in results.

[lucy24]

I assumed that only Mobile Friendly sites would be in the Mobile First index

If your content is so phenomenally good that there's nothing on a mobile-friendly site to match it, the site will still show up in the index even though it looks lousy on mobile devices. Compare G###'s own Google Books, which is flat-out unreadable on anything smaller than a desktop--but still shows up in mobile searches because the content exists nowhere else.