I asked Google's John Mueller in yesterday's Google hangout if Google will be notifying new sites after the July 1st change over if those sites are not ready for mobile-first indexing. The issue is, by default, all new sites on July 1st will be indexed using mobile-first indexing - even in the rare case that site is not really ready for mobile-first indexing. So I wanted to know if they would at least notify the site, via Search Console, if the site can fix issues that are hurting it because of mobile-first indexing.
John said there are no plans to send notifications in those situations. The blog post did say "new websites are generally ready for this method of crawling." So they don't expect this to really be an issue. John also tweeted that:
Most new sites seem to work fine on mobile. If you're creating a new site that doesn't work on mobile devices, I suspect you will have a bad time regardless of SEO :)
— 🍌 John 🍌 (@JohnMu) May 28, 2019
But then he added that the next step with mobile-first indexing is the next 50% that has not moved over yet. And with that, Google will begin sending out messages to help those sites get ready. John said that maybe they can send these notifications to both sites in desktop-first indexing as well as those already in mobile-first indexing - but he is not sure.
Here is the video embed at 9:05 start time:
Here is the transcript:
Barry Schwartz: Mobile first indexing, new sites will not get notifications starting to July 1st if they're not mobile-friendly mobile first indexing, they're not gonna get that mobile first indexing notification but if they aren't mobile-friendly and you are doing mobile-first indexing because they're it's the default, are you gonna send a notification saying hey there's issues here?
John Mueller: As far as I know, not.
Barry Schwartz: Based on your blog post, you said generally most sites that launched these days are not experiencing any issues [with mobile-first indexing]. Yeah okay so I guess you may if you see that change but for now there's no notifications, okay, thank you.
John Mueller: I don't know. That's that's an interesting question, like if we should notify them.
I think one of the next steps will probably be for us to figure out what kind of issues are remaining and to start notifying the the old sites that have these types of issues. And maybe that's something wrong because they will we might as well just flag all sites that have these issues even if they're already switched over.
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Forum discussion at Twitter.
