What is mobile-first indexing and how to optimize it for your site?

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What is mobile-first indexing and how to optimize it?
Did you know that over 50% of all internet traffic comes from mobile devices rather than computers? This is why failing to optimize your website for mobile means you are losing a large portion of your audience.

As devices like smartphones and tablets become more and more dominant in people’s daily lives, it has become increasingly important to optimize websites for these devices – so important that Google has moved entirely to mobile-first indexing.

Keeping mobile-first indexing in mind is crucial hungary phone number data failure to optimize could hurt your Google rankings. But what is mobile-first indexing and what can you do to prepare for its effects?

We will answer both questions below, read on to learn more.

Table of Contents view
What is Google Indexing?
Before we specifically address mobile-first indexing, we need to understand Google indexing as a whole. What is indexing and how does it work?

Google's index is essentially the complete catalog of websites that it has crawled using its web crawlers. Google does not have access to every site on the Internet, only those it adds to its index.

Google's web crawlers scan the Internet and catalog all the new websites they find. Whenever the bots find a website that offers some value to users, Google adds it to its index.

So when someone searches for something on Google, the search engine pulls results from its index, ranking them based on ease of use and relevance to that particular search.

What is mobile-first indexing?
Now that we've explained how Google indexing works, we can return to the initial question: what is mobile index?

Index mobile-first simply means that when Google indexes websites, it prioritizes mobile versions over desktop versions. In the past, the opposite was true, but as mobile devices have grown to comprise the majority of search traffic, Google has decided to make a radical change.

Think of it this way: most sites have two versions, mobile and desktop. Previously, when Google indexed a site, it used the desktop version as the primary version and that format to determine page rankings. Now, it indexes the mobile format as the primary format.

This does not mean that Google creates a separate mobile-first index. It still uses the original index but prioritizes mobile versions over desktop versions.

What does this mean? Well, let’s say your website is optimized for desktop but not mobile. With mobile first indexing, it doesn’t matter if your desktop version is high quality. The low quality mobile version is the one Google will index, so your rankings won’t be optimal.

Simply put, if you want to have a chance of ranking higher in search results, you need to optimize your site for mobile devices as much as possible.

How to optimize your site for mobile first index?
There are several ways to create a mobile-friendly website . Some measures will help Google to display your site better and help it achieve a higher ranking.

Here are four key tips to optimize your mobile-first site!

1. Use a responsive design
The first and most important thing to do is to implement a responsive design for your website. Responsive design refers to a form of web design where the elements of the site automatically adapt to the screens they are on, whether desktop or mobile.

While you can tackle mobile optimization by creating two separate sites, one desktop and one mobile, it is much easier to create a single site and make it responsive. This will help you avoid issues with different URLs and duplicate content .