Mobile First Timeline - When Will Google Move The Remainder of Websites?
-
A common question from anxious webmasters who have separate/smaller mobile websites is: _"Will Google move my site over to mobile-first, even though I'm not "ready" yet?" _It's not an easy question to answer. Here's what we know so far:
-
Google is currently already migrating websites over that have a strong correlation between mobile and desktop content
-
Google is taking the migration process very slowly, and for now, is not migrating sites over that are not "ready".
-
Google has not announced any firm timeline for when they plan to migrate the remainder of all websites.
In answering this question, I typically mention all of the above to help allay any fears. I then state that it could maybe be anywhere from one year to several years before the process is over - but with a huge disclaimer that this is pure speculation, and that only Google knows for sure. Lastly, I reiterate that Google in the meantime is strongly encouraging webmasters w mobile sites to ensure that they match the desktop version (URLs, schema, video, metadata, etc). So the choice is to either to upgrade to responsive/adaptive, or upgrade the mobile site. This is where the future is going.
STILL - any additional feedback / thoughts / ideas / tips on this are welcome, because I continue to struggle with answering this question for clients. Thanks!
-
-
So glad if it's useful!
-
Wonderful points and advice, thank you Bridget!
-
Great question! I love also that you're thinking about how to give support to your clients beyond just answering their literal question -- you're absolutely right that a lot of people are just feeling a bit of anxiety around being "not ready".
My typical response would be very similar to the points you've outlined, and I typically try to offer reassurance that this change isn't necessarily as drastic as it sounds as long as you already have a functional mobile-friendly version of your website. I suspect that part of the question comes from the issue of what Google views as "ready" to migrate versus what the webmaster might feel they need to do before they feel "ready". But as long as your mobile version is performing well and you have all the content accessible and user friendly, I don't think there's a lot to worry about.
I wrote a post for the Moz blog earlier this year to answer some of the FAQs people have about the shift to mobile-first indexing, you might find it helpful either for your own answer to this question or as a resource to share with people who ask you about it: https://moz.com/blog/mobile-first-indexing-seo
-
Agreed, one single URL is the ideal. This question is more geared towards webmasters who still have separate (smaller) mobile sites, and are more wondering how long they can get away with it.
-
I'd say the ideal is hide nothing and make all your content load from the same urls. Don't modify the content aside what is done automatically with a responsive framework like Bootstrap or Materialize.
If your clients are using shared hosting and struggle with load times both of those frameworks have options to only implement the absolute minimum for the features the customer wants, and for the extreme minimalist "Fluidity" is a mere 115 bytes.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
What does actually Mobile First Index means?
Hello All, What does actually Mobile First Index means? Is it that on my desktop in google.co.uk when I will search my keyword then site will come on top whose Mobile performance is good as per google? and then what is Mobile Second Index? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | micey1231 -
Why doesn't my website crawl by Google?
Hi mozzers and members, I am having issues, why my website: http://profilecosmeticsurgery.com/ crawl by Google? let me share more clearly when this starts happening. A month or around 45 days back our website is being indexed and crawled quite well without any issues with having .html extension pages with static built website.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SEOOOOOoooooooo
We finally thought to change to .php version and make whole website and its pages to be treated dynamically.
Once we changed all changes, thereafter this issues started. It has been more than 45 days, our website isn't being crawled since then. I didn't know what are the things preventing this to? Please help. Thanks in Advance Capture1.PNG0 -
How important is the optional <priority>tag in an XML sitemap of your website? Can this help search engines understand the hierarchy of a website?</priority>
Can the <priority>tag be used to tell search engines the hierarchy of a site or should it be used to let search engines know which priority to we want pages to be indexed in?</priority>
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mycity4kids0 -
Google Tag Manager
Has anyone used Google Tag Manager and do you feel it is worth it?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ChristinaRadisic0 -
Google is Really Slow to Index my New Website
(Sorry for my english!) A quick background: I had a website at thewebhostinghero.com which had been slapped left and right by Google (both Panda & Penguin). It also had a manual penalty for unnatural links which had been lifted in late april / early may this year. I also had another domain, webhostinghero.com, which was redirecting to thewebhostinghero.com. When I realized I would be better off starting a new website than trying to salvage thewebhostinghero.com, I removed the redirection from webhostinghero.com and started building a new website. I waited about 5 or 6 weeks before putting any content on webhostinghero.com so Google had time to notice that the domain wasn't redirecting anymore. So about a month ago, I launched http://www.webhostinghero.com with 100% new content but I left thewebhostinghero.com online because it still brings a little (necessary) income. There are no links between the websites except on one page (www.thewebhostinghero.com/speed/) which is set to "noindex,nofollow" and is disallowed to search engines in robots.txt. I made sure the web page was deindexed before adding a "nofollow" link from thewebhostinghero.com/speed => webhostinghero.com/speed Since the new website launch, I've been publishing new content (from 2 to 5 posts) daily. It's getting some traction from social networks but it gets barely any clicks from Google search. It seems to take at least a week before Google indexes new posts and not all posts are indexed. The cached copy of the homepage is 12 days old. In Google Webmaster Tools, it looks like Google isn't getting the latest sitemap version unless I resubmit it manually. It's always 4 or 5 days old. So is my website just too young or could it have some kind of penalty related to the old website? The domain has 4 or 5 really old spammy links from the previous domain owner which I couldn't get rid of but otherwise I don't think there's anything tragic.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | sbrault740 -
How can I resolve weird duplicates showing up because of my mobile website?
We launched a mobile site a month ago following the parallel mobile structure with a URL: m.example.com The week later my moz crawl detected thousands of dups which I am trying to resolve right now by implementing canonical tags on the mobile version and rel=alternate onto the desktop version. So what is weird is that I found urls that were detected as duplicates on top of the regular duplicate: www.example.com/name?device=desktop m.example.com/name?device=mobile These 2 urls double the number of duplicates. Can you tell me what are these? is this normal? and how can I fix those? Thank you mozzers!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ideas-Money-Art0 -
Google does not target my website properly!
Hello everyone, My website : www.pentrucadouri.ro, despite is a .ro with romanian content and is hosted in Romania appear for google.ro as a english targeted website.Google see internal pages as romanian ones but main page as english . In order to change this , I added : Also few days ago I uploaded a geositemap and I submitted this to google. Do you have suggestions ? Website ranks 2nd for "cosuri cadou" on google.com and 3rd on bing, but on google.ro ranks 11 . Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | VertiStudio0 -
Will Google Visit Non-Canonicalized Page Again and Return Its Page's Original Ranking?
I have 2 questions about canonicalization. 1. Will Google ever visit Page A again if after it has been canonicalized to Page B? 2. If Google will still visit Page A and found that it is not canonicalizing to Page B already, will the original rankings and traffic of Page A returned to the way before it's canonicalized? Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | globalsources.com0