Up until now, the Google bots were analyzed in accordance with the desktop versions of the website. However, Google is now experimenting with mobile-first indexing and claims that now more pages are embracing mobile technology.
“It’s been two years since we started working on ‘mobile-first indexing’ – crawling the web with smartphone Googlebot, similar to how most users access it. We’ve seen websites across the world embrace the mobile web, making fantastic websites that work on all kinds of devices.”, said John Mueller, Webmaster Trends Analyst at Google, in a blog post. Adding further, “There’s still a lot to do, but today, we’re happy to announce that we now use mobile-first indexing for over half of the pages shown in search results globally.
However, Google mentions that pages do not have to be mobile-friendly in order to be considered for mobile-first indexing. It is also advised to web developers to make sure that mobile pages carryover structured data from the desktop counterparts.
Related: Top 10 Search Engine Optimization trends for the year 2019
Additionally, Google reminds the developers to search the source code for “img” tags and double-check that the page is providing relevant alt-attributes for the images that they want to be discovered by the Google Images.
