Google’s Mobile Indexing Change: What you need to know
Google has now released more information on their upcoming Mobile First indexing, a tool that will change how search engines rank mobile versions of webpages. Webmasters and SEOs have had plenty of questions about how this is going to work, and these new details seem to answer some of them.
The change has come about because Google wants to make sure they are best serving their users with quality searches. With more than 50% of searches being made on mobile devices, the fact they were only ranking desktop searches was becoming an issue. Some users were using searches that came up with good desktop results, only to find the mobile content was severely limited.
Who does it impact?
All sites will see their mobile content ranked, so this will affect people in two different ways. If you have different content for your mobile and desktop sites or you have removed structured data markup from your mobile pages, this will apply most specifically to you. If you have identical content over all platforms, you don’t really need to worry.
Sites that are currently utilising m.example.com configurations, where mobile and desktop versions how completely different pages, will be most affected. Because these sites have different content, the mobile pages could lose their ranking for the long tail keywords that only appear on the desktop version of the sites. This would have a significant impact on the ranking of the mobile site.
After all, if the content is not on the page, it will be pretty hard to rank it.
If you have removed markup from mobile data in order to speed upload time, then you will need to add that back to your page. Otherwise you will lose the rich snippets once Google changes to its new ranking system. You should do this sooner rather than later. Google does recommend that you reduce the amounts of structured data on pages saying: ‘When adding structured data to a mobile site, avoid adding large amounts of markup that isn’t relevant to the specific information content of each document.’
If you’re unsure about how any of this is going to impact on your site, it’s definitely worth taking a closer look as it is certainly going to shake things up a bit.
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