Google: you cannot opt-out of mobile-first indexing

Google’s John Mueller said in a video on YouTube that you cannot opt-out of mobile-first indexing:

“Mobile-first indexing is the process of indexing websites using a smartphone like user agent. We started working on this a few years ago because we noticed most users are now using smartphones.

Mobile-first indexing is separate from mobile friendliness. Even sites that don’t have a mobile version at all can be indexed fine with a mobile Googlebot. […]

We don’t plan to provide an opt-in or opt-out for this kind of indexing.”

You can view the video here:

What do you have to do now?

Mobile-fist indexing is separate from mobile friendliness. If Google’s mobile-first crawler indexes your web pages then your web pages won’t get high rankings in Google’s mobile search results if they aren’t mobile friendly.

Use the mobile SEO tools in SEOprofiler to optimize your web pages for Google’s mobile results. SEOprofiler also offers automatic website audits for mobile websites:

Optimize your website for mobile

Tom Cassy

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