For the basic understanding every Search Engine has its own robot or a crawler that crawls the web pages of a website and gets them indexed on the database after which a website starts to exist online. Googlebot is the crawler for Google that crawls the website pages and passes it on to the Spider another robot of google and that in turn passes the information to Google’s database and then the website starts existing online.

Google on 26^Th Mar’18 announced a new update about Mobile First index Roll Out– whereby Google will be migrating those sites that follow best practices for Mobile First Indexing.

How Does it Works:

The Google robot will first crawl the mobile site of a website and then the desktop site and will accordingly give ranking to the website on its SERP (Search Engine Result Page) depending on how optimized it is (in other words website’s ease of use and how relevant it is for the internet searches).A website’s content should be responsive i.e. whatever information you have on a website should open on all the devices accordingly. For example, if you are trying to open the website on a desktop then it should be displayed accordingly and the same website if opened on a mobile or a tablet it should be displayed according to that device. It should not be that the website gets opened on the desktop properly but when trying to open on any other device the content gets mashed.

So, all the websites should be made Responsive to avoid any issues related to the devices which are being used to open a website.

In the past few years there has been a sharp increase in usage of smartphones and people have become more Mobile Friendly. On top of that because of the data packages being offered by the mobile networks at very less cost people have started using internet over the phone itself rather than on a desktop or a laptop. So, with websites being Responsive people will be able to get through a company’s website on the mobile phone itself. As per google if a website is mobile friendly then it will have more visitors and more chances of increasing the conversion rate or leads.

For making it mobile friendly the website needs to have Logo which is more visible, content which is readable and buttons on the site should be easy to click.

Few More Steps for making a Website Mobile Friendly:

• The Content being used on the website should be relevant and high quality be it text, videos or images.
• The Structured data of the website should be the same for both mobile and desktop version.
• The Meta tags being used for the desktop and mobile site should have the same information though for mobile site the character length would decrease
• The Social Metatags like Open Graph Tags and Twitter tags should be there for mobile and desktop sites both.
• The link for sitemaps should be accessible from mobile site also
• Get your mobile site verified through the Search Console Verification

Now coming over to usage of the Java script affecting a Website’s Mobile First indexing.

As per Google if a website has more usage of Java Script in the source code then it will be difficult for the crawler to understand if it should index the website’s pages for mobile first indexing or not and most probably it might not crawl the website thinking that it will be safe to avoid crawling it. Lot of usage of Java script and CSS on the front end of your website will increase the loading time of the website which in turn affects a website’s SEO. So, to avoid that the Java Script and CSS (style sheet) of a website should be minified. More and more pages should be visible and less use of robots.txt for disallowing of pages of the website.

Here’s wishing everyone for a Successful and Happy Mobile First indexing from IIADM – One of the Leading Advanced Digital Marketing Training Institute.