Alveena Ahmad
We believed that Google’s 2016-launched mobile-first indexing effort was finished in October. However, it won’t be truly finished until after July 5.
John Mueller from Google stated on the Google blog that “the small set of sites we’ve still been crawling with desktop Googlebot will be crawled with mobile Googlebot after July 5, 2024.”
Mueller clarified:
“There is no change in the way these sites are crawled; the majority of the web is already crawled in this manner.” But “we’ll crawl and index these sites with only Googlebot Smartphone after July 5, 2024.”
Google “will no longer” index and consequently rank your website if it is not mobile-friendly.
Google indexing requires mobile accessibility. In other words, Mueller stated, “Your site’s content will no longer be indexable if it is not accessible at all with a mobile device.”
It’s been a while coming. For websites that just do not render on mobile devices, Google has finally drawn a line in the sand.
This does not imply that if your website is not mobile-friendly, Google will not index it. Google is essentially saying that it won’t index your website if it doesn’t load or render properly on mobile devices.
It’s okay if all you have is a desktop template as long as the desktop version opens on a mobile device.
Still some desktop slithering to do. According to Google, the Googlebot Desktop crawler is still occasionally used for product listings and Google for Jobs. This implies that Googlebot Desktop might still be visible in your reporting tools and server logs.
Why it matters to us:
This won’t likely be a problem for the majority of you. However, if you are hired to perform SEO for someone and their website does not load on your iPhone or Android device, it may also not be indexed and crawled by Google after July 5. Making sure the website loads properly on mobile devices and testing it with the Google Search Console URL Inspection tool are your main objectives.
