Friday, November 26, 2021
We first started working on
mobile-first indexing
a number of years ago. Since then, we’ve switched to indexing the majority of web pages with
Googlebot-Smartphone. Our existing plan was to
complete mobile-first
indexing by March of this year.
In the meantime, after analyzing the sites that are not yet indexed mobile-first, we’ve
determined that some of these sites are still not ready to be shifted over due to various,
unexpected challenges that they’re facing. Because of these difficulties, we’ve decided to
leave the timeline open for the last steps of mobile-first indexing.
Next steps
In Google Search Console, there are two ways to check for mobile-first indexing: the status is
shown on the settings page and
in the URL Inspection Tool.
For websites that Google has already moved to mobile-first indexing, no changes are necessary.
We’ll continue to crawl and index your website with mobile Googlebot.
We recommend that websites which Google has not yet moved over to mobile-first indexing follow the
mobile-first indexing best practices
guide, also taking into account the information from
our last blog post.
We’ll work gradually to move those remaining sites over. If a website is not verified in Search
Console, we won’t be able to inform it of a pending switch to mobile-first indexing.
If your website has different mobile and desktop versions, you may see changes when we shift your
site over to mobile-first indexing. If your website has the same content on mobile and desktop,
you generally won’t see changes in how your site is shown in Search.
In general, this is a technical change with regards to how
Google crawls and indexes the content on a website. If your website is not in mobile-first
indexing, and you have resolved any issues that your site has, you don’t need to take further
action. Over time, as we continue to see sites become ready for mobile-first indexing, we’ll
start shifting these over again.
Timeline
Earlier, we thought that we could complete the move to mobile-first indexing by March 2021.
However, we found that some sites were facing unexpectedly difficult challenges and we wanted
to accommodate their timelines. We currently don’t have a specific final date for the move to
mobile-first indexing and want to be thoughtful about the remaining bigger steps in that direction.
For questions, please post in the
Search Central help community or
contact us through our online events.