Most people reading this probably already know that back in October of last year, Google’s Gary Illyes announced that Google will create a mobile-only index. More importantly, the new mobile index will now be Google’s primary index.

Before we jump into what this update might mean for your site, let’s review some of these terms and the current Google landscape.

Before we jump into what this means for you, let’s start with the basics.

What is a Google index?

  • In layman’s terms, indexingis the process of adding webpages into Google
  • When Google crawls (or visits) your site, it reads the content and adds it to its index (a list of all of the pages on the internet).
  • Each time Google comes to your site it updates any new content and adds any new pages to the index.

So what’s a mobile index?

  • Currently Google is using the desktop index for both mobile and desktop search results. That means, Google only looks at your desktop site to document information, pages and content.
  • Moving forward, Google will be more interested in your mobile site, and the content and webpages located there.
  • The desktop index is not going anywhere; however, we can assume it might fall out of date while the mobile index is top priority.

Why, Google? Why?

How many blog posts have we written here at The Markey Group about how we now live in a ‘mobile first’ world? Think about it, one can essentially live their life without a desktop computer, it’s crazy!

That’s why mobile is making this update. Google’s mission is to provide the best information possible – and with more and more searches happening on a mobile device, this is the best way for Google to ensure they are providing the best results for every search.

How scared should I be?

Basically, the only pages affected will be pages who have a mobile version that doesn’t include the same content as the desktop version.

Is that you? Then it’s time to you have a mobile friendly website, ASAP!

More details are still being released, and we will continue to keep you updated.

In the meantime, please let us know if you have any questions or if you need help effectively optimizing your website to account for this change!