Yesterday during the video hangout with Google's John Mueller I asked if the mobile first indexing rollout was at all related to what folks were seeing with this past weekend's Google algorithm update. In short, John said no, they are unrelated.
Firstly, the mobile first indexing didn't go live or start rolling out until after the blog post. The blog post was on Monday afternoon, John said that it may have started rolling out yesterday or today or later this week but it did not roll out Monday. It was just an announcement before the roll out happened. So since the algorithm update started late last week, the timing does not align.
Secondly, Google is aiming for the search results to not change that much over this mobile-first indexing change. There may be some changes but Google is aiming to not have much change in the search results with this change. Time will tell if this is true.
Finally, Google is not confirming this weekend update as far as I can tell.
Here is the video starting at 48 seconds in:
Transcript:
Barry: So congratulations on officially rolling out the mobile first indexing process.
There are some people asking if what people saw over the weekend regarding, like a March 23rd algorithm update or something like that, if that's in any way related to maybe what was being rolled out with the mobile first index or with the mobile first index you probably wouldn't notice any ranking fluctuations?
John: I don’t know if you wouldn't notice anything.
In general overall it should be fairly smooth. But I I believe they only started rolling this out like I don't know this today, tomorrow, this week sometime. And not before the blog post went live.
Barry: Okay. So you're confirming the rollout really… because nobody's really seeing any examples of this happened in the search results. So you're saying you launched the blog post first and then after that you're pushing it out?
John: Yeah. I mean we already had some sites rolled over to mobile first indexing this is just I guess a next bigger batch of sites that is happening.
The plan is also to send the messages through Search Console. I believe they're behind there, so it might be some sites over this week and send them a message next week or something like that. But in general you should get a message for that.
Barry: Okay so most likely the stuff you saw over the weekend is probably completely unrelated to this and Google's not confirming anything that happened over the weekend as far as you know?
John: As far as I know. So that’s like. My guess is that's unrelated to the mobile first indexing change.
Forum discussion at Twitter.
