Google announces its mobile-first index of Search results

Earlier in December last year, Google reportedly announced its plans on launching the mobile-first index of Search results. According to the announcement made by them, the new setting of Search results would reflect how well the system was used by its users on the web.

However, the search giant did not roll it out until much later. The Alphabet Inc-led company is finally rolling the latest update out. In a blog post published on Tuesday, March 27, Google made the announcement mentioned above by suggesting that they were migrating the websites that follow the best practices.

History is proof that Google ideally takes factors such as crawling, indexing and ranking systems into account while analyzing the desktop version of a page. However, the company later discovered that it was quickly becoming problematic for them as the full text of the website is vastly different from its mobile counterpart. In other words, the website version of a particular site is not the same as the mobile version.

Therefore, Google came forward with the proposal that mobile-first indexing would ideally make sense. After active research through numerous websites, the search giant felt that the solution to this problem would be making use of mobile-first indexing. This system primarily utilizes content from the mobile version of different websites. Therefore, the system would fall in line with the primary way through which users are making use of search.

However, this kind of change does not necessarily reflect Google’s decision to maintain separate indexes for desktop and mobile. Here’s what Google has to say on the matter: “We continue to have one single index that we use for serving search results. We do not have a “mobile-first index” that’s separate from our main index. Historically, the desktop version was indexed, but increasingly, we will be using the mobile versions of content.”