Google: mobile-first indexing by default for new domains

Google has announced that mobile-first indexing will be enabled by default for all new, previously unknown websites, starting July 1, 2019.

“Over the years since announcing mobile-first indexing – Google’s crawling of the web using a smartphone Googlebot – our analysis has shown that new websites are generally ready for this method of crawling. […] It’s fantastic to see that new websites are now generally showing users – and search engines – the same content on both mobile and desktop devices! […]

Our guidance on making all websites work well for mobile-first indexing continues to be relevant, for new and existing sites. For existing websites we determine their readiness for mobile-first indexing based on parity of content (including text, images, videos, links), structured data, and other meta-data (for example, titles and descriptions, robots meta tags). We recommend double-checking these factors when a website is launched or significantly redesigned.

Google recommends responsive web design

Google’s blog post confirmed that Google recommends responsive web design and single URLs for both mobile and desktop websites:

“While we continue to support responsive web design, dynamic serving, and separate mobile URLs for mobile websites, we recommend responsive web design for new websites. Because of issues and confusion we’ve seen from separate mobile URLs over the years, both from search engines and users, we recommend using a single URL for both desktop and mobile websites.

Mobile SEO tools for you

SEOprofiler offers many tools that help you with mobile SEO and mobile rank tracking. The website audit tool in SEOprofiler can also check the mobile version of your website. You can get your SEOprofiler account here:

Mobile SEO tools

Tom Cassy

Tom Cassy is the CEO of SEOprofiler. He blogs about search engine optimization and website marketing topics at “http://blog.seoprofiler.com”.