Google started to prioritize mobile websites

Thursday, September 20, 2018

A couple of months ago, Google announced that it would prioritize mobile websites in its search results. Well, he just started implementing it! Here's part of an e-mail we just received from Google: 

Mobile-first indexing enabled for numerique.ca 

To owner of https://numerique.ca/,

This means that you may see more traffic in your logs from Googlebot Smartphone. You may also see that snippets in Google search results are now generated from the mobile version of your content.

Background: Mobile-first indexing means that Googlebot will now use the mobile version of your site for indexing and ranking, to better help our (primarily mobile) users find what they're looking for. Google's crawling, indexing, and ranking systems have historically used the desktop version of your site's content, which can cause issues for mobile searchers when the desktop version differs from the mobile version. Our analysis indicates that the mobile and desktop versions of your site are comparable.

What are the implications?

Basically, he's warning us that we'll be seeing an increase in traffic caused by Googlebot Smartphone and that some parts of its search engine results will use content from the mobile version of our website. For websites that are already responsive, this is great news since our positioning will be even better than before! For those that lagged behind in their updates, they'll see an even bigger decrease in their website's efficiency (at least until they make updates for their mobile customers).

If you've lagged behind and your website still isn't optimize for your mobile customers, don't hesitate to contact us! We have some low-cost packages to allow you to finally enter the mobile era ;)