During a hangout, one SEO professional asked John Mueller about mobile-first indexing and how it could potentially help with a site’s ranking.
Their main question was: does mobile-first indexing help you with search rankings? Their website is still being crawled on Googlebot desktop, and they cannot figure out why it isn’t switching to mobile.
They have been through the Google documentation and troubleshooting, but nothing jumps out to them as needing to be fixed.
They also asked if moving across to a progressive web app and offline support would help this issue.
John explained that mobile-first indexing does not change anything for ranking. So it’s not the case that you need to force any kind of a move to mobile-first indexing. This is purely a matter of indexing and picking out the content that Google would use on a website.
From that perspective, John would not worry about this.
If their site works fine on mobile, then at some point, it will be switched over. He believes there are still some sites left, which they haven’t switched over to mobile-first indexing yet.
For the most part, however, Google has switched most sites over, and for those that are remaining, they do continue to double-check them to make sure they are ready.
And when Google thinks they are ready, they will just switch them over. But, it’s not the case that you would notice any ranking change there, unless the mobile version is significantly different from the desktop version.
And that would also be a reason for them to not switch a site over to mobile-first indexing.
If the mobile version is significantly different and they did use mobile first-indexing for their site, then Google would just index their content based on the mobile version.
If there is more content on a desktop version, then they would just ignore that. Also, from that point of view, John would not try and force this.
Moving to a progressive web app is something that can be done, but John does not think this would impact how mobile-first indexing examines a website.
Usually, when it comes to a progressive web app, they are JavaScript framework websites. And this brings a new set of challenges along with that (crawling JavaScript).
You need to make sure that Google can actually see your content, because JavaScript is something that Google can usually handle quite well.
However, it’s not always easy to configure a site so that Google can handle the rendering of JavaScript content–static HTML pages are usually easier.
This happens at approximately the 46:35 mark in the video.
John Mueller Hangout Transcript
John (Submitted Question) 46:35
Our question is, does mobile-first indexing help with search rankings? Our website is still being crawled by Googlebot desktop, and we can’t figure out why it isn’t switching to mobile-first. We’ve been through the Google documentation and troubleshooting but nothing jumps out. Would moving across to a progressive web app and offline support help?
John (Answer) 46:53
So first of all, mobile-first indexing does not change anything for ranking. So it’s not the case that you need to force any kind of a move to mobile-first indexing. It’s purely a matter of indexing and picking out the content that we would use on a website.
So from that point of view, I would not worry about this. If your website works fine on mobile, then at some point, it’ll be switched over. I believe there’s still some sites that are left that we haven’t switched over yet.
But for the most part, we’ve switched, I guess, most sites over and those that are kind of remaining, we continue to double-check them when they’re ready. And when we think they’re ready, we’ll just switch them over. But it’s not the case that you would notice any ranking change there, unless the mobile version is significantly different from the desktop version. And that would also be a reason for us not to switch over to a mobile-first indexing.
And if the mobile version is significantly different, and we did use mobile-first indexing for your site, then we would essentially just index your content based on the mobile version. And if there’s more content on a desktop version, we would ignore that.
And so from that point of view, I wouldn’t try to force this. Moving to a progressive web app is something you can do, but I don’t think it would affect how mobile-first indexing looks at your website. And usually when it comes to progressive web apps, usually they’re JavaScript framework websites.
And usually that brings a whole set of other challenges that come with that, in that you need to make sure that Google can actually see your content, because JavaScript is something that we can usually render and handle well. But it’s not always as easy as a pure static HTML page.
