Guidance on Google’s Mobile-First Algorithm launching on July 1, 2019

What does this mean for your website? It means all the work we have done on your website (desktop) is going to be superseded by the mobile-first ranking algorithm. They are going to be using your mobile site as your ranking index, not your desktop. Yes, I know, that’s a huge shift. We haven’t really done anything on mobile sites except to make the desktop mobile-responsive. The good news is that we have also followed all of Google’s best practices.

You can check that your website is mobile-friendly here. If you see errors, please note that these errors are the result of previous algorithm requirements such as blocking protocols that don’t need to be indexed. Blocking resources that contribute to “thin content” penalties and such.

Here is the link for Google’s guidance on Mobile-First Indexing.

Requirements for the Mobile-First Ranking Algorithm

Below is a list of things to do on your website so that it meets Google’s requirement for the new mobile-first indexing algorithm

Kindly note that because we followed Google’s best practices prior, the changes to your mobile site are not as much or as many as a website that did not follow the guidelines.  This only holds true if you are our client.  If you are not our client and would like to integrate all the latest algorithms, please contact us for more information.

Google’s Best Practices for Mobile-First Indexing Algorithm:

• Structured data should be the same on mobile on desktop
• Meta data should be present on both mobile and desktop
• Canonical AMP
• Separate URLS: m-dot URLs for mobile, Google prefers Mobile URL for indexing
• Verification of mobile site on Search Console
• Increase server capacity for Mobile crawl rates
• Check robots.txt to ensure mobile-first indexing capabilities are not hindered
• Check rel=canonical and rel=alternate elements between mobile and desktop versions
• Integrate best practices for dynamic serving and separate URLS

Another tool that google has released in anticipate of this Mobile-First Algorithm is this: https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/feature/testmysite as you can see mobile websites that we have built will average and load within 2.5 seconds but they want it to be even faster and load within a second. We will be working on Mobile speed as obsessively as we have been working on Desktop speed.

If you would like us to update your Website to include the Mobile-First Indexing Algorithm, please get in touch.