Google's revised mobile-first indexing deadline is coming up in the next several weeks. Google said it is going 100% into mobile-first indexing. Google moved the deadline from September 2020 to March 2021. John Mueller of Google said today the March 2021 is an approximate deadline.
John was asked if all sites will be moved over by April 1, 2021. John said on Twitter "That's approximately the target. We don't have a critical reason to reach any particular cut-off date, so it could be that the remaining sites are a bit spread out, some earlier, some a little bit later."
So some may be moved over 100% prior to April 1, 2021 and some may lag behind and move over after April 1, 2021.
Here are those tweets:
That's approximately the target. We don't have a critical reason to reach any particular cut-off date, so it could be that the remaining sites are a bit spread out, some earlier, some a little bit later.
— 🍌 John 🍌 (@JohnMu) February 23, 2021
If a site is moved to mobile-indexing and it has these issues, the site's rankings in Google can and most likely will change - maybe for the worse.
Here is the abbreviated list from Google that you should double check between your desktop version and mobile version of your site:
- Robots meta tags on mobile version
- Lazy-loading on mobile version
- Be aware of what you block
- Make sure primary content is the same on desktop and mobile
- Check your images and videos including
- Image quality
- Alt attributes for images
- Different image URLs between desktop and mobile version
- Video markup
- Video and image placement
You can read Google's full post on this over here.
So be prepared, which I expect most of you are and most of your sites are already moved over to mobile-first indexing. But if not, be prepared.
Forum discussion at Twitter.
