With Google’s mobile update taking place in a few days, many bloggers are tweaking their website to be mobile friendly. If you recently created a blog, then you’ve probably installed a responsive theme because several templates in WordPress are already mobile ready. However, if you’ve been around for years, then it’s time you redesign your site so it’s mobile-ready. When I’m searching online, I see this questions being asked many times: How long does it take for Google to know my website is mobile-friendly? This is something those moving from older themes to responsive ones need to worry about and I’m here to shed some light on this very question. After doing research, I was able to find some strategies that will help your website get indexed much quicker after you’ve done a theme update.
Let’s look at “4” important things you can do once you’ve redesigned your website for mobile platforms.
Before going any further, it’s important to note that after implementing these strategies, the changes can take anywhere from 12 to 72 hours.
Installing the Theme
Before you can move into the strategies discussed below, it’s important you make sure you purchase a theme that is “responsive”. These types of themes will automatically adjust to the platform the visitor is arriving on your site from, like a tablet, desktop PC, or mobile phone. By using a responsive theme, you’re making sure to increase the user experience once they arrive on your website, which is important for your bottom line. After making these changes, you can move onto the next step to streamline the indexing of your new website.
Content Freshness
If you have to make theme changes and have content that needs to be published then I would wait until the new theme has been installed before adding content. It’s well known the Google freshness update will reward websites with faster indexing depending on the frequency of new content being published. Once you’ve installed your responsive theme, then start publishing content every 3 days so indexing bots come back to your website to re-index. During this process, they’ll crawl your pages and other files like Java/CSS, which contains the blueprint of your theme’s design. This is a great way to tell Google you are NOW running a mobile friendly theme.
To ensure your website has been indexing and displaying the mobile theme within the search results, you can use Google’s mobile Test to make sure they’ve picked up on the changes.
Google Webmaster Tools
If you don’t have a GWT account, then you’re missing out on many features, especially “Fetch as Google”, which will alert Google of changes. Here’s a quick definition of this tool by Google:
“Fetch as Google is a diagnostic tool that allows you to simulate how Google crawls or renders a URL on your site.”
Once you’ve updated your theme, and it’s now responsive, you can head over to GWT and enter your URL within “Fetch as Google”. This will alert the bots to crawl your site and render the changes to the search engines. You have the option to alert Google of page changes or tweaks you’ve made to the entire website. Because switching the theme will reflect the entire website, I recommend fetching the entire URL then rendering it to the search results. Google, after a few hours, will update the site and the display as it appears to them. You can see the difference through the image displayed next to the URL within your GWT backend.
I recommend to look for crawl errors at the same time because this will stop them from re-indexing your website so make sure Google is having no problems accessing your blog before and after the redesign.
Building Links + Ping
It’s widely known links from high authority websites will get your blog indexed more quickly. When indexing, Google will follow the internal and external links on a website to find where they are pointing to. The value of the website will be pushed to the website they are linking to and this also helps get sites indexed at the same time. Once you’ve gone mobile, I recommend building high authority links over time. This strategy isn’t as quick as the others, however, it will result in Google indexing your website. Start with the other two above while creating links to your website because either way, high authority websites will help with ranking your website.
After you’re done building links, you can head over to pingomatic.com to alert the crawl bots about the changes. However, before building links, I recommend the following:
- Find relevant sites for link building
- Make sure you do it slow and steady
- Check for website DA and PA before building links
Link to all pages to create a deep linking structure