Google Mobile Index News Google have plans to roll out a separate Google Mobile Index which they are currently testing out. Gary Iylles, a webmaster trends analyst with Google announced that they plan to launch in the coming months. Currently most searches are being carried out on a mobile device. Google’s ranking systems still typically look at the desktop version of a page’s content to evaluate it’s relevance to the user. This can cause issues when the mobile page has less content than the desktop page because Google’s algorithms are not evaluating the actual page that is seen by a mobile searcher.
Google’s search index will continue to be a single index of websites and apps, their 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 their results. Google assure that while their index will be based on mobile documents they are going to continue to build a great search experience for all users, whether they come from mobile or desktop devices.
What you can do to be mobile index ready:
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It would be worth making sure that the content and links on the mobile site are similar enough to the desktop version so that google can consume the proper content and rank your site as well as it did crawling your desktop site.
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Make sure that you have structured markup for both mobile and desktop.
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Make sure that your mobile version is accessible to Googlebot with robots.txt testing tool.
Impact On Ranking
Gary Illyes said this should not change the overall rankings. Their goal is not to have this indexing change impact the current rankings by much.
Google will be announcing the change in a future blog post. We will as always keep you up to date with further developments on this in the near future.