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First batch of Google mobile-first indexing notifications goes out today

Achievement unlocked! Google has begun sending out mobile-first indexing notifications to webmasters.

Barry Schwartz on April 30, 2018 at 10:09 am

For the first time since Google announced the rollout of the mobile-first indexing process just over a month ago, SEOs and webmasters are now getting notifications via Google Search Console of their sites being “enabled” for mobile-first indexing.

The notification reads “mobile-first indexing enabled for” and specifies the domain name of the site it was enabled for. Ari Finkelstein shared a screen shot of the notification with us.

It reads:

This means that you may see more traffic in your logs from Googlebot Smartphone. You may also see that snippets in Google Search results are now generated from the mobile version of your content.

Background: Mobile-first indexing means that Googlebot will now use the mobile version of your site for indexing and ranking, to better help our (primarily mobile) users find what they’re looking for. Google’s crawling, indexing, and ranking systems have historically used the desktop version of your site’s content, which can cause issues for mobile searchers when the desktop version differs from the mobile version. Our analysis indicates that the mobile and desktop versions of your site are comparable.

This is a big milestone since Google originally announced the mobile-first indexing experiment in November 2016.

About The Author

Barry Schwartz

Barry Schwartz is Search Engine Land's News Editor and owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on SEM topics.