New Domains - Mobile First Indexing

New website creators should optimize their sites for mobile phones!!!Be as mobile-friendly as possible!

Mobile First Indexing Framework

On May 28, 2019, Google announces that they have made a significant change to their search console. They have implemented what is called “mobile first indexing.”

Mobile-first indexing means Google predominantly uses the mobile version of the content for indexing and ranking. In the past google’s algorithm considered the desktop version of webpages to rank and index the content in its search result based on its relevance to search terms.

This has been in the pipelines from as early as 2016 when google made a blog post on Google webmaster central blog.

To make our results more useful, we’ve begun experiments to make our index mobile-first. Although our search index will continue to be a single index of websites and apps, our algorithms will eventually primarily use the mobile version of a site’s content to rank pages from that site, to understand structured data, and to show snippets from those pages in our results. Of course, while our index will be built from mobile documents, we’re going to continue to build a great search experience for all users, whether they come from mobile or desktop devices.

Friday, November 04, 2016

Posted by Doantam Phan, Product Manager

This change has come as most of the users of google’s search engine use mobile phones to conduct searches. It is also necessary as a lot more search is done now as voice command via the “ok google” handle. The website crawler Googlebot will now mainly engage webpages with the smartphone agents of its framework thus preferentially indexing the mobile version of websites.

For existing websites they determine their readiness for mobile-first indexing based on parity of content (including text, images, videos, links), structured data, and other meta-data (for example, titles and descriptions, robots meta tags). They recommend double-checking these factors when a website is launched or significantly redesigned.

Older websites will notify them through Search Console once they’re seen as being ready. Since the default state for new websites will be mobile-first indexing, there’s no need to send a notification.

Users can check for mobile-first indexing of their website by using the URL Inspection Tool in Search Console. By looking at a URL on your website there, you’ll quickly see how it was last crawled and indexed.

There are a few guidelines that Google has set out to make it easier for uses to maintain & improve their ranking with the changes to mobile indexing:

1. Use mobile friendly/ responsive templates when creating websites.
2. Your mobile site should contain the same content as your desktop site.
3. Use separate URLs for mobile versions from desktop version and ensure that the markup is structured by using Google’s Structured Data Testing Tool
4. Do not block googlebot from crawling on your websites

Other tips can be found here!

What does this mean for domain investors?

Mobile first indexing will now be the default for new domains starting July 1, 2019. Google’s analysis has shown that new websites are generally ready for this method of crawling as they have the same content on both mobile and desktop versions.

The extent of the mobile-friendliness of your website will have an impact on your rankings compared with competitors having a more mobile friendly framework. Generally, brands that offer a poor mobile experience will be impacted negatively.

If you already have a responsive website that meets the validation criteria in the various google testing tools, then there should be minimal to no impact on your site.

It’s important to note that there isn’t a separate mobile-first index; Google Search continues to use only one index. Google Search continues to show the URL that is the most appropriate to users (whether it’s a desktop or mobile URL) in Search results.Pay-Per-Click Advertisements

With google now preferentially ranking the mobile versions of brands and websites, this can have a major impact on the cost of advertisement and its effectiveness.

If the speed of your mobile site is slow (longer page loading time), this may lead to an increase in the bounce rate of certain pages which may have income generating content. The speed of your website also impacts the ranking and overall quality score of your landing pages in google’s ad framework. This may lead to an increase in cost per click for your ads. You may test your site page speed here: TEST

If a sites mobile version has different content from the website version, the earning power of that site can be drastically reduced, especially if there is a dependence on SEO and display ads for monetization.

Webmasters are encouraged to pay close attention to the mobile versions of their sites and optimize it in similar fashion to the desktop version.

What does this mean for the .mobi domain extension. Will there be an increase in acquisition of these extensions. What are your views? Please leave your views in the comments below. How do you think this change in google search will impact domain buying and selling.

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