Website owners are well aware of how important mobile accessibility is these days. With the number of people browsing the web on their phone or tablet increasing every month, not having a mobile-friendly site is no longer acceptable. Google will soon start experimenting with a new site indexing system based on mobile site availability.
A New Indexing System For Google is Neigh
Staying on top of the Google search results is a very difficult task these days. Website owners have seen the rules change several times in recent years, and it looks like the search engine giant has a new plan in mind to shake things up once again. It is not surprising to see Google focus on mobile accessibility, as it is quickly becoming the new norm for accessing web content.
Google acknowledges that the majority of web users are searching for content on a mobile device. Desktop versions of any website do not always scale well on mobile, as the smaller screen size is not suitable for large images and walls of text. Thus, optimizing these platforms for mobile has been a top priority for site owners for many years now.
All of these efforts are bound to pay off at some point in the future. If it is up to Google, that future is just around the corner. The company will change its search engine indexing rankings based on mobile sites, rather than on their desktop counterparts. This new “mobile-first” index will cause some headaches for companies who are looking to maintain their top Google positions, for sure.
Although this new algorithm is only being tested on a small scale right now, the plan is to expand this new functionality. No official timeline has been proposed at this point, although it is expected that things will gradually change in the coming 12-18 months. Site owners who only offer a desktop version or a responsive layout that scales well on mobile will not have to undertake any particular action.
Those site owners whose mobile version of the platform is vastly different from the desktop counterpart will have their work cut out for them, though. Several things will need to change, including the site’s markup structure. Google offers a Structured Data Testing Tool to facilitate this process.
Google has been advocating a more mobile-friendly search engine indexing for quite some time now. The company introduced a new algorithm that ranks mobile-friendly platforms higher than others, and has been using this system for over a year and a half. Slowly but surely, mobile is the new norm for everything Internet-related, and Google is driving this change.
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