Thanks to the proliferation of smartphone use and mobile surfing, Google decided to prioritize mobile-friendly websites when you search for them on your smartphones. This move was to address the growing number of mobile surfing globally. Since websites designed for PCs may not show properly on mobile phones, Google decided to make adjustments on their indexing and ranking systems to accommodate this reality.
Official announcement
Google started looking into this in 2016. In 2018, they officially made an announcement regarding the move, and that they have started migrating to this new indexing system. Since it was just rolled out, everything is dynamic at this point.
The mobile-first indexing can be taken literally. It means that when you run a search, Google will index sites with mobile websites first. This move does not discount the availability and use of desktop-accustomed websites. Indexing will be based on both mobile and desktop sites, but mobile websites will be considered as the primary site. However, content will still take precedence in this indexing system. The site with the most relevant content will still be shown first.
If you don’t have a mobile-friendly site, or if your site is not fully responsive, don’t worry. Your site will still be considered but expect the ranking to be lower. If you have an e-commerce business or offer mobile casino games and rely heavily on site traffic, don’t despair. You can slowly make the transition by asking mobile developers to help you out.
Keep improving
Of course, having a mobile website does not automatically mean popularity. Make sure you improve and keep on improving your site until it is up to par, if not better than others. To do that, you can use plug-ins, use images of great quality that load quickly, make your site load quickly, find alternatives to whole-page pop-up pages, and always test your mobile site. You also have to remember that you have to maximize the space you have, since it is lesser on mobile, make it easy to navigate, and click on icons and links. Google added that between sites that use AMP and ones that don’t it, the latter would be preferred by the system.
Still a bit overwhelmed? You can read up more online.
