Google's John Mueller said in a video hangout on Friday that Google has stopped automatically moving sites to the mobile-first indexing system. Instead, the last batch of sites are being queued up and will all be moved over sometime in the coming month or months.
He said the next time Google moves sites to mobile-first indexing it will likely be the last and then every site served by Google in its search results will be through mobile-first indexing.
Do not misunderstand, desktop only sites will be fine, but they will be indexed using a mobile useragent (like a mobile browser). The sites that will have trouble are sites that have different, less or broken content, links, schema, etc on the mobile version from the desktop version. But most sites, including your sites, are moved to mobile first indexing already.
It will be interesting to see if there is some sort of big rumble in the search results when Google moves over this last batch. I have no idea if it is 30% of the index or more like 5%, the last figure we have is that 70% of the results were already on mobile first indexing and that was back a year ago. So I assume maybe we are a lot less than 30% now but I do not know.
Google said it is going 100% into mobile-first indexing. Google moved the deadline from September 2020 to March 2021. Now, it might be March, might be April or even May John said but it will happen.
John Mueller said at the 45:27 mark into the video:
We have the deadline, I think, set for, we essentially had it set for March. I think there are some technical details with the last sites that we are working out. So we can switch them over in an optimal way. But at some point, it will just be switched over. If that is still in March or maybe in April or maybe even ends up in May, I don’t know. But we are going to be switching all of these sites and if your site is ready then that will just happen then.I think from what I heard from the team we are currently in a state where we are not automatically moving sites over anymore but rather saving all of these up for that last moment and switching a lot of those over at once.
So if you improved your site for mobile-first indexing, then that will just happen. And if it is already showing the same content on mobile that it shows on desktop, then you won’t see any effect. It is not like you will have a ranking boost or any kind of improvement in indexing because of that.
Here is the video embed at the start time:
Here is a bit more from John:
It's more a matter of spreading things out a little bit to catch potential quirks from the remaining sites, the plan isn't to do them all at once :).
— 🍌 John 🍌 (@JohnMu) March 20, 2021
So maybe Google won't do the last batch all at once, like he said in the video?
There's still some work being done to smooth out issues we'd run into if we just switched everything over - we really want to make sure that search remains useful after all :). We don't have an external deadline; if it takes a little bit longer after all these years, that's fine.
— 🍌 John 🍌 (@JohnMu) March 20, 2021
Forum discussion at YouTube Community.
