Google began its efforts to maneuver websites over to mobile-first indexing over six and a half years in the past. Today, Google confirmed these efforts are actually done, and the last batch of websites eligible for mobile-first indexing have been moved over.
Confirmation. John Mueller from Google confirmed immediately was the last batch on Mastodon immediately after I reported there was a massive batch of sites moved to mobile-first indexing up to now a number of hours. John stated that this was the “last batch!”
Not all websites moved. John added that there’ll nonetheless be a “tiny handful of sites that really don’t work on mobile are left.” Those remaining websites, he stated, will “just be crawled with desktop Googlebot going forward.”
Notifications. Today, a variety of SEOs observed that websites which have been on desktop-first indexing have been notified they have been moved to mobile-first indexing. Here is a screenshot from Richard Hearne he posted on Twitter:
History. As a reminder, Google began mobile-first indexing over 6.5 years in the past, and ultimately, after publishing deadline after deadline, Google eliminated the deadline. Google first launched mobile-first indexing again in November 2016, and by December 2018, half of all websites in Google’s search outcomes have been from mobile-first indexing. Mobile-first indexing merely implies that Google will crawl your web site from the eyes of a cellular browser and use that cellular model for indexing and rating.
Google in early March 2020, earlier than all of the lockdowns started throughout a lot of the world, introduced the deadline for all websites to switch over to mobile-first indexing can be September 2020. At that point, Google stated, “To simplify, we’ll be switching to mobile-first indexing for all websites starting September 2020.” Then in July 2020, Google moved that deadline as soon as once more to March 2021.
Why we care. So in case your web site has not but been moved to mobile-first indexing, then it’d by no means transfer to mobile-first indexing. Oh, all new websites by default, ought to be listed over mobile-first indexing. The problem is, John said, websites that weren’t moved over “don’t work with mobile user-agents at all.”
This took a lot longer than anybody anticipated, however the process appears to be formally now done.
