Google has started rolling out Mobile-First index. This new update is going to change the way your website gets ranked in search engine result page.

What is Google Mobile First Index?

You may probably know that Google uses a bot to surf around your website and follow links on your pages. Earlier, Google crawled your site as a desktop user, but after implementing this new Mobile-first index, Google will be crawling your website as a mobile user.

A website appears in a different way to mobile users and desktop users. The links appearing on desktop version might not be appearing on the mobile version. In such cases, Google bot cannot follow links that are not visible on mobile versions. The consequence is that your website may experience a hit in the search engine result page.  If the Google bot experiences that your website is unfriendly to mobile users, you will definitely be losing your search engine ranking.

Why Google Uses Mobile First Index?

Over the past few years, the number of mobile users has surpassed the number of desktop users. Moreover, the mobile searches also outnumber desktop searches. So, Google is authorizing its bot to crawl pages as a mobile user. That is why the experts are insisting webmasters to have a responsive website to represent their business both on the desktop and mobile platform as well.

Will Google Mobile First Index have impact on search engine ranking?

According to recent statistics, more than 50% of searches are being made from mobile devices. So, Google is changing the mode it ranks websites and switching over to mobile search index exclusively to augment mobile search results. Websites that fail to present the same content on their desktop and mobile sites will have some impact.  Google’s Mobile First index is set to ensure that mobile websites are ranked only based on the content they supply and the mobile users are being directed to the sites that contain information what they are actually searching for. So, adapting your website to the mobile platform is certainly worthwhile.

When will Google mobile-first indexing come into effective?

Google has just started rolling out its mobile-first crawler. So, it takes several months before implementing this new indexing mode. Google did say that it will roll out more searches to make sure that the mobile-first indexing is working well.

Though there will be two indexes during this rollout period, Google might move on to one index in the long run. Once Google becomes more convinced with the mobile-first results, the company will slowly eliminate the desktop index and adopt mobile-first indexing.