{"id":9573,"date":"2023-05-22T13:45:41","date_gmt":"2023-05-22T13:45:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/craighordlow.com\/index.php\/2023\/05\/22\/google-has-done-its-last-mobile-first-indexing-switch-today-a-six-year-process\/"},"modified":"2023-05-22T13:45:41","modified_gmt":"2023-05-22T13:45:41","slug":"google-has-done-its-last-mobile-first-indexing-switch-today-a-six-year-process","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/craighordlow.com\/index.php\/2023\/05\/22\/google-has-done-its-last-mobile-first-indexing-switch-today-a-six-year-process\/","title":{"rendered":"Google has done its last mobile-first indexing switch today, a six-year process"},"content":{"rendered":"

Google started its efforts to move sites over to mobile-first indexing<\/a> over six and a half years ago. Today, Google confirmed those efforts are now done, and the last batch of sites eligible for mobile-first indexing have been moved over.<\/p>\n

Confirmation. <\/strong>John Mueller from Google confirmed today was the last batch on Mastodon<\/a> today after I reported there was a massive batch of sites<\/a> moved to mobile-first indexing in the past several hours. John said that this was the \u201clast batch!\u201d<\/p>\n

Not all sites moved. <\/strong> John added that there will still be a \u201ctiny handful of sites that really don\u2019t work on mobile are left.\u201d Those remaining sites, he said, will \u201cjust be crawled with desktop Googlebot going forward.\u201d<\/p>\n

Notifications. <\/strong>Today, a number of SEOs noticed that sites that have been on desktop-first indexing were notified they were moved to mobile-first indexing. Here is a screenshot from Richard Hearne he posted<\/a> on Twitter:<\/p>\n

History. <\/strong>As a reminder, Google started mobile-first indexing over 6.5 years ago<\/a>, and eventually, after publishing deadline after deadline, Google removed the deadline<\/a>. Google first introduced\u00a0mobile-first indexing<\/a>\u00a0back in November 2016, and by December 2018,\u00a0half of all sites<\/a>\u00a0in Google\u2019s search results were from mobile-first indexing. Mobile-first indexing simply means that Google will crawl your site from the eyes of a mobile browser and use that mobile version for indexing and ranking.<\/p>\n

Google in\u00a0early March 2020<\/a>, before all the lockdowns began across most of the world, announced the deadline for all sites to switch over to mobile-first indexing would be September 2020. At that time, Google said, \u201cTo simplify, we\u2019ll be switching to mobile-first indexing for all websites starting September 2020.\u201d\u00a0 Then in July 2020, Google\u00a0moved<\/a>\u00a0that deadline once again to March 2021.<\/p>\n

Why we care. <\/strong>So if your site has not yet been moved to mobile-first indexing, then it might never move to mobile-first indexing. Oh, all new sites by default, should be indexed over mobile-first indexing. The issue is, John said<\/a>, sites that were not moved over \u201cdon\u2019t work with mobile user-agents at all.\u201d<\/p>\n

This took a lot longer than anyone expected, but the process seems to be officially now done.<\/p>\n

The post Google has done its last mobile-first indexing switch today, a six-year process<\/a> appeared first on Search Engine Land<\/a>.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Google started its efforts to move sites over to mobile-first indexing over six and a half years ago. Today, Google confirmed those efforts are now done, and the last batch of sites eligible for mobile-first indexing have been moved over. Confirmation. John Mueller from Google confirmed today was the last batch on Mastodon today after I reported there was a massive batch of sites moved to mobile-first indexing in the past several hours. John said that this was the \u201clast batch!\u201d Not all sites moved. John […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"h5ap_radio_sources":[],"cybocfi_hide_featured_image":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9573","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-best-seo-blogs"],"featured_image_src":null,"featured_image_src_square":null,"author_info":{"display_name":false,"author_link":"https:\/\/craighordlow.com\/author\/"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/craighordlow.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9573","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/craighordlow.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/craighordlow.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/craighordlow.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9573"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/craighordlow.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9573\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/craighordlow.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9573"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/craighordlow.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9573"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/craighordlow.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9573"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}