What Does Mobile First Index Actually Mean?

There are many things that a SEO analyst should master when it comes to SEO services. One of the examples is mobile first index, but first, let’s understands what indexing means. Indexing is described as the process of turning your webpage into something more useable and storing it in their database. You can find a lot of cool stuff that happens here. For instance, word vectors, and all kinds of other awesome computer science stuff. For our purposes though, Indexing is when they make a copy of your page in a format that’s useful to the ranking algorithm.

So What Is Mobile First Indexing?

Now, by creating signals based on Googlebot, you can figure out whether a site is mobile friendly or not. Therefore, a user searches Google the retrieval part of the algorithm looks at the desktop index created by the Googlebot desktop crawler. It finds relevant results based on the desktop index, then ranks them and even shows the searcher a snippet based on the desktop index. The ranker then looks at the mobile signals collected by mobile crawler and adjusts the rankings accordingly.

However, sometimes it can cause some problems. For example, in many cases where a user gets redirected and they realize that the content they saw in the search snippet isn’t available on the stripped down mobile version of the site.

Moreover, it is important to be remembered that “mobile index” and “mobile friendly” is a different thing. Mobile friendly is how you design your sites. So that it will be convenient enough to be displayed on your mobile. On the other hand, the categorization of mobile index includes three scenarios:

Responsive Site

Issues include things like changing the weights for tabbed content or drop-down menus which are probably less valued on desktop but shouldn’t (in theory) be devalued in mobile.

Separate Mobile and Desktop Sites

Here’s where things get tricky. If a site has device type redirects OR rel=alternate and canonical tags setup, then the mobile crawler will see the mobile site only, and not the desktop site. That means if some content is ONLY on the desktop site, the mobile Googlebot won’t see it and it won’t end up in the mobile first index. This is the issue Google is trying to solve, but it’s also an issue for many publishers.

No mobile site

The mobile Googlebot will still see these pages! The mobile crawler doesn’t just crawl “mobile friendly” pages. It crawls everything. These pages will still be seen – they just won’t get the “mobile friendly” designation – but that’s completely OK because it has absolutely nothing to do with mobile first indexing. Sure they won’t rank as well as mobile friendly sites – but they’re already not ranking as well as mobile friendly sites. That won’t change after mobile first indexing.