According to company spokesman John Mueller at Mastodon, Google has successfully transitioned the last group of websites to mobile-first indexing. However, due to mobile compatibility issues and the inability to be scanned by a mobile crawler, only a small number of exceptions remain.
The long-awaited transition to mobile-first indexing
Google originally announced its intention to move to mobile-first indexing in November 2016. Since July 2019, this type of indexing has become standard for all new sites. However, it turned out to be more difficult than planned to complete the transition of all sites to mobile-first indexing.
Postponement of the date of the final transition
Initially, Google planned to move all sites to mobile-first indexing in September 2020, but then the deadline was moved to March 2021. However, the analysis of non-translated sites showed that many of them were not ready to switch for various reasons. Due to these difficulties, Google decided not to set specific deadlines and left the deadline open.
Successful completion of the transition
In mid-February 2023, John Mueller announced Google’s plans to complete the transition of all sites to mobile-first indexing in the next couple of months. And, as we see, these plans were successfully implemented. Thus, the transition process took Google more than 6 years.
Moving the last group of sites to mobile-first indexing is an important step for Google to provide an optimal user experience on mobile devices, notes NIX Solutions. This long and careful process will allow the search engine to better understand and rank mobile-optimized content.
Now Google will be able to continue its mission of providing quality and relevant search for all users, no matter what device they access the search engine from.