What is Mobile-First Indexing?

Understanding Google’s mobile-first indexing shift and preparing technical architecture for crawler parity.

Speakers: Erdal Çay

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Erdal ÇayinSEO on Board

10 May 2017

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⏱ 7 min read• 1,257 words

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Hey ZÖL followers, I'm Erdal. I'm with you for this week's Nissey Onboard video. Today's topic is mobile-first indexing. Google announced it a little while ago. We'll answer what it actually is. And we'll share our take on how to avoid losing traffic on the SEO side. Here's what the update basically means. Mobile and desktop search results will now be built off your mobile pages. As you know, that wasn't the case before. Until now, both mobile and desktop results were evaluated using desktop pages.

So how do we prepare for this update? First we need to understand why it's happening. Look at Google's own announcement. The core reason is simple. Searches on mobile devices passed searches on desktop devices. That shift is what this update is built on. Google has one core motivation behind every search quality update. Make sure the user reaches the content they're looking for. That same motivation shows up here too. So we can say this pretty confidently. Page content sits at the center of this update.

And by page content, we don't just mean text and images. Every data type you serve through HTML falls under this update. So let's look at that scope. Or rather, let's go through the data types. I've got a 10-item checklist here. Here's what we need to be able to do. On our mobile pages, the mobile versions of our pages. We need to make sure every point I've listed here is handled right. All the data has to be served to Googlebot correctly. So what are these data types?

First up, category copy is huge for e-commerce sites. Category text needs to show up on mobile pages exactly like it does on desktop. Same deal for product descriptions on e-commerce sites. For both e-commerce and content projects. The number of products and articles on listing pages matters a lot. The mobile version needs to serve the same count as desktop. Equal numbers, no cuts. Next point: images. This one tracks directly with your product and content counts. If those counts match up, images probably won't be a problem either. Next data type: CSS and JavaScript resources.

If you use different URLs for your mobile pages, watch out. We need to make sure your CSS and JavaScript resources are crawlable. Next point: metadata. That covers Open Graph tags, Twitter Card, Meta Robots. Basically all the metadata we serve to Googlebot. We also need to make sure this metadata shows up on our mobile pages. Another point: user areas like comments and reviews. User-generated content needs to be on our mobile pages too. Next up we have REL annotations. These are things like canonical, prev/next, and hreflang. We use them with HTML's link element. We need to serve these to Googlebot through our mobile pages as well.

Another point Google really pushes is structured data markup. Just like on desktop, our mobile pages must pass structured data to Googlebot. Otherwise our structured data won't show up in desktop or mobile results. Another big one is breadcrumb structure. Most mobile sites do build breadcrumbs. But most web sites don't use breadcrumb links for mobile pages. We think breadcrumbs matter a lot for internal linking and crawlability. So our mobile pages need breadcrumb links with a solid design. They need structured data markup too. Internal links matter just as much. They drive crawlability and a solid information architecture.

Most web sites skip the footer on mobile. But we still need to check one thing. Our internal links have to be right in the main nav up top. And the last item is on-page SEO. Title tags, meta descriptions, headings. We should have handled those already, update or no update. We also need to look at these data types another way. It depends on the tech serving your mobile pages. Mobile pages split into two groups. Same URL, or a separate URL. With the same URL, you're using one of two things. Responsive, or dynamic serving.

With a separate URL, sometimes it's a subfolder. But mostly we see subdomains. If you're responsive, you don't need many changes. Google says so too. Your HTML stays the same. It matches your desktop version. Dynamic serving gets trickier. There you can serve different HTML per user agent. I'll cover the specific points in a moment. With subdomains, you know the drill. Every mobile URL needs a canonical tag. It points to the desktop version. So take hreflang tags, for example. You don't need those on the subdomain version. Same goes for meta data. It can vary in the subdomain setup.

We've done a lot of these reviews before. Some for our clients, some across the web. We compared mobile and desktop pages. A few key issues kept showing up. So here are the critical points to watch. These matter most as you prep for this update. Like I just said, breadcrumb links are often missing on mobile pages. Do you think breadcrumbs help your SEO performance? Then serve those breadcrumb links on mobile too. Just make sure the design is right. Structured data is really important here. Definitely run a check on your structured data. Same URL or separate URLs, it doesn't matter. You have to serve that structured data on your mobile version too. Let me touch on something we see all the time.

Infinite scroll. Most web sitesi use it to improve the mobile experience. You'll see it on listing pages and homepages. It's a nice win for user experience. But for SEO crawlability, it's a problem. You need it to be SEO friendly. So integrate infinite scroll with pagination tags. We'll share a link about this in the description. It's documentation on how to do it. It covers integrating infinite scroll with pagination tags. Now another important point. Call it one of the errors we run into.

Category descriptions, product counts, and product descriptions. Same goes for the number of items listed on your listing pages. All of it should match your desktop pages. At minimum, match what's on desktop. We touched on this earlier too. You have to check your internal links. Look at the internal links you serve on desktop pages. Links to categories or subpages. You need those on your mobile pages too. And there's another area to optimize. This one matters regardless of the update. Site speed. With this update, desktop results get determined by mobile pages. So site speed moves way up in importance. That's why we recommend every site speed optimization you can make.

A few last things before we wrap up. That's the scope of the update. But there are a couple of points to know. Here they are. Like I said at the start, this is our read on it. It's what we've pieced together from Google's statements. This update shouldn't affect off-site factors. Things like backlinks and social signals. It stays limited to page content. Second point: there won't be more than one index. Google still has a single index. And it's staying that way. A mobile-only index isn't on the roadmap right now. Another thing: our mobile and desktop pages still get crawled by Googlebots with different user agents. Nothing changes there either.

Say we use a different URL for our mobile pages, like a subdomain. Then we shouldn't change the canonicals pointing to desktop. And if we don't have a mobile page. Our desktop pages will keep ranking in mobile results. That's all I've got for today. Use the comments section for questions, thoughts, and feedback. Thanks.

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Erdal Çay

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