Google to Move Some Sites to Mobile First Index in Coming Weeks

February 23, 2018

Google to Move Some Sites to Mobile First Index in Coming Week
Google’s Gary Illyes has confirmed that a significant number of sites will be migrated to the mobile-first index in the next month and a half. Illyes announced Google’s upcoming plans for the mobile-first index while on stage at Pubcon in Austin, Texas.

The last official word we heard from Google regarding mobile-first indexing was this past summer, when Google’s John Mueller mentioned it was being rolled out to individual sites that are ready for it. Since then, we have published a help article with Google’s advice on getting ready for the mobile-first index.

The company initially planned to have all sites migrated to the mobile-first index by early 2018, but it doesn’t look like that goal is going to be met. Moreover, Google has said it will not tell us when migration to the mobile-first index is complete.

However, following Illyes’ keynote at Pubcon, we have learned that the new index may never be fully rolled out to all sites.

The mobile-first index is Google’s attempt at looking at the web and indexing and ranking the web from a mobile-first perspective. This means that if you have a mobile-friendly version of your website, instead of indexing the desktop version, Google will first index that website’s mobile version.