Any moment now, the industry media will blow the craze for Mobile First Indexing to the limit. While this trend is by no means news, after John Mueller’s recent assertions, headlines will trumpet: “don’t have a site tailored for smartphones = you’re out of Google.” While some may interpret the Google representative’s words that way, that’s not what they meant.
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Does not having a mobile version mean disappearing from Google’s index?
The words of Google’s John Mueller sounded more or less like this:
(…) we will throw out [z indeksu] everything that is only on the desktop version. We’ll just zigonify it.
(…) everything you want to index must be in the mobile version.
The final deadline is March 2021.
There is a danger here that the words will be misunderstood, so I will prophylactically rush to clarify.
This is the case when there are separate versions of the site – for example, a desktop version and a version for mobile devices.
Googlebot from March will ignore and not index content available only on the desktop version, not available on a mobile device.
In practice, if we have, for example, a product description that is 3,000 characters long on the desktop and shortened “to make it read better” on the mobile version, only the latter content will be considered by Google. 3000 characters sweated out by a copywriter to a dog.
The same goes for other resources – so if we have a lot of beautiful graphics on the desktop version, and on the mobile version we abandoned them – they will fall out of the index.
So if my site is not responsive, I won’t disappear from Google?
No, i.e. not yet 🙂
Of course, it’s extremely imprudent not to have a site that looks good on a phone in 2021, but that’s not the point here.
The lack of responsiveness of the site will not remove it from Google’s index. Only resources unavailable to the mobile bot will disappear. If they are available, the fact of how they are presented is another tale.
Of course, such a lack of responsiveness is a huge hindrance to SEO and certainly lowers the overall visibility of the site. However, it will not result in complete removal from the index.
So who needs to fear the coming changes?
If you have several versions of your site, for example, a mobile version on the subdomain m.domain.pl – check if the content that the mobile version serves is exactly what you want to index.
Here I have 3 tips for you to consider:
- good advice is to try to have the same content under both versions of the site
- Even better advice is not to mess around with separate versions of the site, but to make one responsive one
- The bad advice is to create separate versions of the site for desktop and mobile. This is advice that you probably heard at some point, and now you’re in trouble – but there’s no need to cry over spilled milk 😉
