Tuesday, May 28, 2019
Over the years since announcing mobile-first
indexing—Google’s crawling of the web using a smartphone Googlebot—our analysis
has shown that new websites are generally ready for this method of crawling. Accordingly, we’re
happy to announce that mobile-first indexing will be enabled by default for all new, previously
unknown to Google Search, websites starting July 1, 2019. It’s fantastic to see that new websites
are now generally showing users—and search engines—the same content on both mobile and
desktop devices!
You can continue to check for mobile-first indexing of your website by using the
URL Inspection Tool
in Search Console. By looking at a URL on your website there, you’ll quickly see how it was last
crawled and indexed. For older websites, we’ll continue monitoring and evaluating pages for their
readiness for mobile first indexing, and will
notify them through Search Console
once they’re seen as being ready. Since the default state for new websites will be mobile-first
indexing, there’s no need to send a notification.
Our guidance on making all websites work well
for mobile-first indexing continues to be relevant, for new and existing sites. For existing
websites we determine their readiness for mobile-first indexing based on parity of content
(including text, images, videos, links), structured data, and other meta-data (for example, titles
and descriptions, robots meta tags). We recommend double-checking these factors when a website is
launched or significantly redesigned.
While we continue to support responsive web design, dynamic serving, and separate mobile URLs for
mobile websites, we recommend responsive web design for new websites. Because of issues and
confusion we’ve seen from separate mobile URLs over the years, both from search engines and users,
we recommend using a single URL for both desktop and mobile websites.
Mobile-first indexing has come a long way. We’re happy to see how the web has evolved from being
focused on desktop, to becoming mobile-friendly, and now to being mostly crawlable and indexable
with mobile user-agents! We realize it has taken a lot of work from your side to get there, and
on behalf of our mostly-mobile users, we appreciate that. We’ll continue to monitor and evaluate
this change carefully. If you have any questions, please drop by our
Webmaster forums
or our public events.
How we apply this
We archive Search Central announcements because client questions often trace back to a change that was announced years ago. Reading the original is faster than reconstructing it from second-hand summaries.
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