Google’s journey toward prioritizing mobile devices has reached its destination as Mobile First Indexing reaches completion.
Starting its emphasis on mobile responsiveness in 2015 with the “mobile friendly update,” Google began mobile-first crawling and indexing a year later in 2016.
This pivotal shift not only redefined Google’s indexing methodology but also pressed the global web community to ensure that mobile web pages stood shoulder-to-shoulder with their desktop counterparts.
The rise in mobile web traffic has been undeniable. In certain regions, users predominantly browse the internet via their phones.
The commendable transformation of the mobile web into a roaring success is attributed to dedicated site-owners, SEO experts, web developers, and designers.
However, there remains a small subset of websites yet to be mobile-optimized. These sites present common issues such as showing errors to mobile users, blocking mobile versions via robots.txt, or redirecting all mobile site pages to the homepage.
Addressing these concerns is beyond Google’s purview, leading to their decision to persist with the legacy desktop Googlebot crawler, albeit reviewing this choice periodically.
In light of the full transition to Mobile First Indexing, Google has decided to deactivate the indexing crawler information within the Search Console settings.
The rationale being, sites optimized for mobile are predominantly being indexed through Google’s mobile crawler.
The tech giant wraps up by expressing gratitude. The collaborative effort of countless site-owners to render the web universally accessible, catering to all mobile device users, is deeply valued.
The completion of Mobile-First Indexing underscores the profound shift in user behavior and technological advancement. For marketers, it’s clear that optimizing for mobile isn’t just a best practice; it’s an imperative for modern success.
