We warned you, it’s coming. The thing that we expected over the past few years, finally happened. Google first announced plans to move to indexing with the priority of mobile content in 2016. Such a system means that the ranking of pages in the search will depend on their mobile version, and not on the desktop, as before. This means that if you’re building a new website – you absolutely need to to have it developed with mobile in mind and also optimized for speed. Google took this step due to the fact that most people who use their search do it on mobile devices. This trend has been set since the beginning of 2015.
The company said that the new indexing system Google will work with all new websites created from July 1, 2019 for now. For older sites, nothing will change: Google will monitor the quality of their mobile versions and report on their readiness to switch to a new index via the account in the Search Console. Company representatives also explained that the index for the search results would be one: in other words, there is no separation between the mobile and the main (desktop) index.
It seems like the company is going to extend this policy to all websites sometimes in the future. It is going to be a massive hit search results, since almost 60% of small business websites are not optimized for mobile devices. So if your website doesn’t have a proper mobile version – your website doesn’t exist in the eyes of Google.
