Google, the king of search, has announced plans to shake up its indexing and ranking algorithm to prioritise the mobile site over the desktop one.
The company argues that most people use Google search on mobile anyway and that such users will obviously prefer results that link to mobile sites. Google’s current algorithm indexes the desktop version of a website and ranks that sites pages for content in desktop mode.
Google says that today, this is the wrong approach to take. Mobile sites can sometimes offer less information than their desktop counterparts, which is bad for a mobile-first world. Keeping this in mind, Google is now conducting experiments with its search algorithm to determine the best way to rank websites in the future.
“Although our search index will continue to be a single index of websites and apps, our algorithms will eventually primarily use the mobile version of a site’s content to rank pages from that site, to understand structured data, and to show snippets from those pages in our results.”
Currently, Google’s live indexing algorithm is still looking at Desktop pages first, so you have some breathing space to transition your site to mobile (if you haven’t already).
The company says that if you have a responsive, dynamic website, you shouldn’t be worried. If you don’t have that and instead use different structures for desktop and mobile, Google has some suggestions for you here.
Google adds that if you’re building a new site, it will be better to have a functional desktop site than an incomplete mobile site.