Google expects to apply mobile-first indexing to all websites within 6-12 months!
Who doesn’t like user-friendly sites? User-friendly sites are those which provide a great user experience when visiting a site. Nowadays, people want mobile-friendly sites rather than desktop or any device. Day by day mobile users are growing and the demand of users are also increasing. In digital marketing it also helps you to build credibility among customers. It’s not a hidden fact that Google continue tries to make the web more mobile-friendly and make the experience more enhancing and enjoying one. This is the reason Google lately decides to apply mobile-first indexing to all websites within 6-12 months i.e. by the end of this year (2020). Are you aware of the term “mobile-first indexing”? If not aware then you’re at the right place. In this article you’ll learn what mobile-first indexing is and why Google decides to apply it to all websites.
So let’s start our day with the concept of mobile-first indexing.
What does the term mobile-first indexing mean?
To put simply- mobile-first indexing means more priority is given to mobile version of the content for indexing and ranking. At present almost everybody has mobile and if they want to search something they use mobile first. Mobile first indexing is the term when user try to surf something on mobile then the user experience should be same as desktop or laptop. Google introduced mobile-first-indexing back in November 2016. Also, Google looks at the mobile version of a page first, when examining how well a site should rank. For Google, mobile version becomes the baseline when determining the rank of the site.
Google to apply mobile-first indexing to all the websites
Few days ago, Google was rolling out notifications for mobile-first indexing issues detected on users’ site through Google search console. In those emails, Google finds the issues it encounters when moving the site over to mobile-first indexing. In the released notification Google says, “Google expects to apply mobile-first indexing to all websites in the next six to twelve months.” Yes, probably by the end of this year, all indexing will be done using mobile-first indexing at Google.” Yes folks, now all the websites will be switched to mobile-first indexing and this will happen by the end of this year.
What’s the mobile-first indexing issue detected on website?
I tell you the reason of Google to apply the mobile-first indexing to all the sites is the issue detected in it. Let’s read what the issue is – 2-3 days ago many user’s sites was rejected from mobile-first indexing and then Google Search Console detected that the site has issue that prevents Google from enabling mobile-first indexing for your site. Google Search Console finds the issue of “Missing Image” this issue prevents the page or affected images from appearing in search results when Google indexes a site as mobile-first.
Furthermore, missing image means mobile page has no access to all the relevant images that the desktop page has.
What is the reason of the issue? The basic reason is that mobile page doesn’t have all the significant images that the desktop page has.
How to fix the issue of “missing image” on site page?
If you find the issue of missing images on your site then you should apply the following method to fix it up:
- First you need to check that both your desktop and mobile site contain the same content. In case, your mobile site has less content than desktop then you are required to update it because relevant contents shown on mobile site are used for indexing.
- Your mobile site and desktop site should have same Meta robots tags. Make sure you don’t use the nofollow tag on mobile page otherwise Goole won’t crawl and index your images on your site page.
- Always use supported & relevant format and tag for images. For instance, Google supports SVG format images, and desktop system can’t index a .jpg image in the <image> tag inside an inline SVG.
- Don’t try to use lazy-loaded content as Google won’t load content that are on-demand and requires user interactions like swiping, clicking, or typing to load a particular content or page.
Concluding remarks!
Guys, Google’s decision to apply mobile-first indexing to all the websites is a good on because it can only increase the ranking of the site and will benefit webmasters in future. Let me also tell you that if a site doesn’t have a mobile version then desktop site can be indexed but the lack of mobile-friendly version of the site could affect the site’s ranking negatively. Also if you are into digital marketing and your website is not mobile friendly then definitely you will lose your customers.
That’s why if you encounter the problem of missing image on your mobile site then you can follow the above method and makes your site a mobile-friendly one. For more updates and interesting articles get in touch with us, till then keep reading and keep sharing guys.
