Google has launched mobile-first indexing, which is the latest development in Google's ongoing efforts to make the Internet more mobile-friendly and to reflect trends in user behavior. But there is also much confusion about what this means for the average entrepreneur. Do you have to change anything? If your site is mobile friendly, is that good enough?
In this post I will discuss the basic principles of what 'mobile-first indexing' means. Mobile first indexing is exactly as it sounds. It only means that the mobile version of your website becomes the starting point for what Google includes in their index and the basis for how they determine the ranking. If you monitor traffic from crawlbots on your site, you may see an increase in traffic from Google's Google bot and the cached versions of pages are usually the mobile version of the page. It is called 'mobile-first' because it is not an index that is only mobile. For example, if a site does not have a mobile-friendly version, the desktop site can still be included in the index. But the lack of a mobile-friendly experience can have a negative influence on the ranking of that site and a site with a better mobile experience might even receive a ranking boost for users on a desktop.
You may also want to see the expression "mobile first" as a reference to the fact that the mobile version is considered the primary version of your website. So if your mobile and desktop versions are the same, for example if you have optimized your content for mobile and / or if you use responsive design, this change should not (in theory) have a significant impact on the performance of your site in Search Results. However, it represents a fundamental change in the way Google thinks about your website content and how you can prioritize crawling and indexing. Remember that until now, the desktop site was considered the primary version and the mobile site was treated as an "alternative" version for a specific use case. Google may not even bother to crawl and cache the mobile versions of all these pages because they can easily display that mobile URL to mobile users.
What this means for your website? According to the latest Google guidelines on this subject, if your website is responsive or otherwise identical in its desktop and mobile versions, you probably don't need to do anything else (assuming you're happy with your current rankings!).