Google rolled out the “mobile-first” index. It’s going to change the way that your site gets ranked in the search engine results pages (SERPs). Here are a few things you need to know about the mobile-first index so that you can optimise your website accordingly.
What is the mobile-first index?
By now, you probably know that Google crawls your site to add pages to its index.
That is, it uses a bot to surf around your site like a real visitor and follows links on your pages.
In the past, Google crawled your site as a desktop user. Now, however, Google will crawl your site as a mobile user. That’s a distinction with a really big difference.
For starters, your website might present a completely different display to mobile users versus desktop users. In some cases, links that appear on the desktop version of your site might not appear on the mobile version. That’s bad because the Googlebot can’t follow links that aren’t there. As a result, your site might take a hit in the SERPs.