What is the Mobile-First Index?
Mobile-first indexing means Google predominantly uses the mobile version of a page’s content for indexing and ranking, whereas previously, the index primarily used the desktop version of a page’s content when evaluating the relevance of a page to a user’s query.
In other words, when it comes to performing well in the SERPs, it’s the mobile version of your site Google’s looking at.
What do we know about the mobile first index?
It might seem like a lifetime ago, but it was in 2016 that Google first announced their plans for mobile-first indexing (MFI). Google spent years transitioning the web to MFI until they announced in early 2020 that they’d be “switching to mobile-first indexing for all websites starting September 2020.”
Botify closely monitored this transition so that we could find out what sites Google transitioned first and which sites were helped or hurt by the transition.
To do this, we evaluated:
- Billions of Googlebot crawls
- Millions of URLs
- Hundreds of unique domains in a variety of sizes and industries
Keep reading to find out what we learned, and how you can optimize your site for our new reality… the mobile-first index.