Mobile friendly is now mobile first. Alaska websites need to think about their mobile friendliness the way Google does.
More people search the internet on their smartphones than on their desktop computers. You know how frustrating it is to get to a website that hasn’t upgraded despite all of Google’s warnings about mobile friendly value.
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To make our results more useful, we’ve begun experiments to make our index mobile-first. Although our search index will continue to be a single index of websites and apps, our algorithms will eventually primarily use the mobile version of a site’s content to rank pages from that site, to understand structured data, and to show snippets from those pages in our results. Of course, while our index will be built from mobile documents, we’re going to continue to build a great search experience for all users, whether they come from mobile or desktop devices.
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Google’s new mobile-first index means that Google will rank it’s listings from what they find on your mobile version of the website.
What does that mean for my site?
- If you are using a mobile only version of the site to be served on phones – make sure that you aren’t abbreviating the content. “See desktop version” won’t be good enough for Google. (And frankly, it’s never been good enough for site visitors).
- If your site is responsive – adapting the size and layout of content for the device – you are probably in good shape.
- If your site isn’t mobile friendly, Google will continue to index your site but will your visitors want to stay?
When is this crashing down on us?
No official launch date but Google is indicating that they are shooting for summer 2017. But whether they launch it tomorrow or next year, mobile-first is a done deal. It’s time to get your site ready.
