Google Search delays the indexing of mobile devices until next year

With smartphone browsing much more common today, Google wants search results to reflect that reality. Google announced in March that the search engine would switch to mobile indexing first in September, but is now being delayed until March 2021.

Google cites “uncertain times,” “it’s not always easy to focus on work,” as the reason to push mobile indexing first next year. By crawling to keep search results relevant, you’ve historically analyzed the desktop version of a site. That changed in 2018 to make Search more representative of how people navigate globally.

The transition has been an incremental process with new sites that will be mobile first last July. With the extra time, Google has identified “a few more issues worth mentioning to better prepare your sites.”

• You must use the same robot meta tags in the mobile version as in the desktop version. If you use a different one in the mobile version (like noindex or nofollow), Google may not index or follow links on your page when your site is enabled for mobile indexing first.
• Lazy loading is more common on mobile devices than desktop computers, especially for uploading images and videos. We recommend following best practices for lazy loading. In particular, avoid slowly loading your main content based on user interactions (such as swiping, clicking, or typing), because Googlebot will not trigger these user interactions.
• Some resources have different URLs on the mobile version than those on the desktop version, sometimes they are served on different hosts. If you want Google to crawl your URLs, be sure not to crawl them with your robots.txt file.

At a high level, Google encourages webmasters to “make sure that the main content is the same on desktop and mobile devices.”

If you intend for the mobile version to have less content than the desktop version, your site may lose some traffic when Google first enables mobile indexing for your site as Google will no longer be able to get the full information.

Other recommendations focus on making sure images are high resolution, have alternative attributes, and are well positioned for Search to retrieve.

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