Google’s Gary Illyes, spoke at the SMX West conference. He stated that Google is still testing the new mobile-first index and unsure when the launch date will be.
Although the team behind the mobile-index want its launch to be this year, IIIyes has assured everyone that they are still working on it and not to expect anything for another few months. IIIyes first revealed the plans back in October 2016 that mobile-index was going to happen in a few months. It’s now March and not much has happened since.
He explains that there are so much to consider before they can announce the launch date, “The mobile web has fewer tokens than desktop. Content and links are more scarce,” he continues, “Mobile sites don’t have a lot of the metadata that desktop sites have. We’re aiming for a quality-neutral launch. We don’t want users to experience a loss in quality of search results. We need to replace the signals that are missing in the mobile web.”
For the meantime, he offered a little homework for SEOs in preparation for the mobile-first index:
- Make sure your mobile site has the content you want to rank for.
- Make sure structured data are on your mobile site.
- Make sure rel-annotations are on your mobile site.
IIIyes said Google will provide more information and guidance to the last two points in the future, as it is still too early to say and there’s no need to freak out just of yet. Patience is the key.