May 25th, 2017
by admin
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search engine analytics web tablet hand searching

Ever since 2015 when it was clear that mobile web browsing was taking over traditional desktop web browsing, Google has been eyeing the possibility of focusing their indexing on mobile versions of websites. Behind this was their need to provide users of their search engine with relevant results when they used it on their mobile devices, so the search algorithm needed to get changed as well in order to display relevant results.

What Does It Mean for You?

Well, this really depends on what kind of a website you’re running at the moment. In some instances, web-masters decide that mobile versions of their websites will be skimmed down in order to offer their users a more straightforward approach or to decrease the data needed to load up all of their content from the desktop version. If you’re in this category, then you need to pay attention to the mobile-only Google index changes in 2017 SEO.

What the change is going to address is taking and ranking the website as it appears on mobile devices first. Google has been using mobile indexing, but it was a secondary parameter in their algorithm. Now, in 2017, they’re looking to make it the primary parameter instead, as more and more people are using mobile devices to browse the web and so they need to be provided with relevant results. To that end, Google will focus on indexing the information on a website exactly as it appears on the mobile version first; which means that the web-masters we talked about above will have to suffer if some of their links and content is just available on desktop versions of their site.

If, however, you’re among the webmasters whose mobile version is an exact replica of your desktop version, then you have nothing to fear. Nothing will change for you in terms of ranking within search results and this index change from Google will not affect you in any way whatsoever.

Actions to Thrive With the New Changes in 2017 

  • Take action, of course.
  • Get the gears in motion and start bringing your mobile version of your website up to par with the web version.
  • Put together structured markups for your mobile version; make sure your mobile website is verified in the Search Console and use tools like the robots.txt testing tool to make sure everything’s running smoothly.
  • The faster you take action on these issues (if they’re present), the faster Google will start giving your website a better overall score in their parameters within the search engine algorithm. With that, you’ll notice a bump in search results placement and, consequently, in traffic which we all know almost always translates into a revenue bump.

Stay ahead of the competition by taking the time to implement these changes and get ready for the mobile-only Google index changes.