Since more and more people are using their mobile devices to browse the web, Google will be ranking websites according to their mobile content. Google is currently experimenting with making its index mobile-first. Basically, this means that mobile searches will take priority but this change will be rolled out gradually over time.
Once this change is official, ranking algorithms will determine how websites should be ranked based off the mobile index. Google did make sure to announce that desktop users will not be excluded. The shift in indexing will be done on a small scale so the desktop experience won’t be lacking. Google is doing everything they can to ensure users on mobile and desktop are both having a positive experience.
Google has provided some helpful tips for webmasters:
- If you have a responsive website and content is fine on both mobile & desktop, do not change it.
- Make changes to your website if you have a site configuration and the content and markup is different between mobile & desktop.
- Structured markup should be done on both mobile and desktop.
- Check to see if your mobile version can be accessed by the Googlebot – use the robots.txt testing tool.
- Verify your mobile site in Webmaster Tools.
For those of you who only have a desktop site, don’t panic because Google will continue to index your website. Make sure you have a properly functioning desktop site while you’re building your mobile version.