SEO Glossary: Mobile First Index

 

What is the Mobile First Index?

The Mobile First Index is a pure search engine index that only includes mobile websites. In order to be included and get into the index, a page must therefore have purely mobile information and features.

 

The goal of the Mobile First Index is to provide a positive experience for search engine users. For example, pages in the Mobile First Index are displayed at the right size and load quickly.

 

Regardless of the Mobile First Index, website owners should make an effort to optimize their site for mobile devices anyway. This includes, for example, a Responsive Design. More and more users are using mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets.

 

 

How does the Mobile First Index work?

In terms of the basic principle, the Mobile First Index works in exactly the same way as the conventional index, in which "desktop websites" also end up. However, only mobile-only sites that are fully mobile-compliant are included here.

 

In order to be included in the Mobile First Index, webmasters must meet a number of criteria. One of these is Responsive Design. It ensures that content is displayed in the right size for the mobile screen.

 

Important to know: There is a clear difference between the Mobile First Index and the Mobile Friendliness ranking signal. This is because the Mobile First Index includes many more features than is the case with mobile-friendliness.

 

So if you want to be included in the Mobile First Index, you have to offer a mobile-only site.

 

How to create or build a mobile version of a website?

The following are ways to create and deploy the mobile version of a website:

 

• Different URLs: If content is to be accessible separately for desktop and mobile devices, this can be done via different URLs. It is important that both versions (desktop and mobile) are marked accordingly. This is the only way for Google to recognize exactly which version is being used.
• Responsive Design: The Responsive Design is ideal if only one version is to be displayed. Here CSS is used to adapt individual elements to the respective screen size.
• Dynamic serving: With dynamic serving, the web server independently recognizes whether a device is a desktop computer or a mobile device. The appropriate content is delivered accordingly. With dynamic serving, all different content is also delivered on one URL.

 

How do you find out if a website is in the Mobile First Index?

The easiest way to find out whether a website is in the Mobile First Index is to use the Google Search Console.

 

To do this, webmasters simply click on "User friendliness on mobile devices" under "Improvements" in the left-hand navigation menu of the GSC.

 

But the querying Google crawlers can also provide information that a website is in the mobile-first index. They carry the typical user agents of mobile devices.

 

The user agent of the smartphone GOOGLEBOT is:

Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 6.0.1; Nexus 5X Build/MMB29P) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/41.0.2272.96 Mobile Safari/537.36 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)