You Still Have Time, Google’s Mobile-First Index Isn't Likely To Be Rolled Out Until 2018

 

Last year, Google posted an article regarding mobile-first indexing, a major algorithm update that would be coming to Google.

At present, Google’s ranking system currently ranks a website primarily on the desktop version of the website. However, as more people now search Google via a mobile device, Google have decided that the most effective way to deliver the best results possible is to focus on the mobile version of the website to evaluate a website.

The article Google published last year stated that they had already begun tests to implement mobile-first indexing.

This is huge news for all business that have a website as it means that their website must be extremely mobile-friendly, otherwise their rankings within Google will suffer dramatically.

At this time, mobile-first indexing is still in the testing stages and in a recent announcement Gary Illyes, Google webmaster trends analyst, said that Google is still “many quarters away” from launching its mobile-first indexing.

He went on to say –

“We [Google] don’t have a timeline for the launch yet, we have some ideas for when this will launch, but it’s probably many quarters away. Our engineers’ timeline was initially end of 2017. Right now, we think more 2018.”

He reassured the audience that Google plans to have proactive talks with webmasters about this massive transition before it takes affect saying -

“We want to communicate a lot with publishers about the mobile-first index, and not let them get surprised by it”.

He went on to say that the challenges Google are facing implementing the mobile-first indexing is that mobile websites generally have less content, fewer links and have a lot of other important things missing.

However, he did say that if you have a responsive website that “you’re pretty much good to go” because the content and structured data is virtually the same on the scaled down version of your website.

So despite you have at least another 6 months until this major algorithm change takes place, you should start preparing and ensure your website is mobile ready!