Skip to main content

Google's mobile-first indexing - what does it mean for me?

Google announced in March of 2018 that they would start migrating sites for mobile-first indexing. By now, presumably this process has been complete and mobile-first indexing is the standard for Google's crawlers. You most likely have received an email from Google that mobile-first indexing has been enabled for your site. What does this mean?

Historically, Googlebot (Google's web crawler) has visited sites as if it were a desktop user, that is, a user with a relatively large screen with a mouse and a keyboard. With mobile-first indexing, Googlebot is now visiting sites first as a "mobile user" - small screen, no pointing device, touch screen, etc.) So to determine what your pages have to offer, it will first look at those pages as a smartphone, and then as a desktop device.

Does this mean there are now separate indexes, one for mobile devices and one for desktops and laptops? No. Google will still use a single index but whatever a mobile user sees is considered the primary content of your site.

So what does this mean to a Yahoo store merchant like you? At this time, Yahoo store websites fall into three categories when it comes to mobile-readiness:

1) Not mobile-ready: these are sites that only have desktop version with no specific attention given to mobile users. For these sites, there will be no change in how Google sees the site: it will index the desktop version (the only version) as before.
A side note here: if your site is not mobile-ready by now, you should really consider changing that. Mobile usage has been skyrocketing in the past few years and you can look at your own site's Google Analytics to see the trend. When shoppers visit a site on their phone and that site loads a minuscule version of their desktop site (which is what happens with non mobile-ready sites), in most cases they will hit that back arrow as fast as they landed on your page. After all, who wants to keep pinch-zooming and swiping in all directions to try to figure out what it is that you are offering? And while your site will not get penalized if it's not mobile-ready, all things being equal, if your site and another comes up for the same search term, the mobile ready will be first. Contact us if your site is still not mobile-ready and want to find out what your options are.

2) Responsive: if your site is responsive, that is, you don't have a separate mobile version, and instead your desktop version automatically adapts to smaller and smaller viewports (such as a smart phone), then there is no change here either: Google will continue seeing your site as is.

3) Adaptive Mobile: you have an adaptive mobile site if you have "Mobile Storefront" enabled in your Store Manager. With this setup, mobile phones (and Googlebot) get an entirely different version of your site, although with the same URL. Here you want to start to pay attention: since Google now considers this as your main content, you have to be very clear on what it is that's being served up to both Google and to your mobile visitors. Essentially, Google wants your mobile content to be the same as your desktop content, including but not limited to your meta tags, captions, images, navigation, etc. When "Mobile Storefront" was introduced to Yahoo store merchants a couple of years ago or so, many merchants used it as a "stop gap" tool, to quickly offer a mobile solution without giving much thought to it. If this is you, chances are you may have forgotten about your poor old mobile storefront, still concentrating most of your efforts on your desktop site. If your mobile storefront's content is vastly different than your desktop, then you should have that changed and have it changed fast! Yahoo adaptive mobile templates are written in the same RTML language that your desktop templates are, therefore, they rely on the exact same underlying data (your catalog), so it is quite possible to set them up so that the same content is served on mobile and desktop. Contact us if you are unsure of how your templates are set up.


4) Dedicated Mobile: these are sites whose mobile presence is serviced by a third-party provider. These sites have a separate URL from their desktop site (usually something like m.mywebsite.com) and the content is completely independent of the desktop version. With Google's new indexing scheme this is the version that Google will consider the "main" version of your site. If you have such a site, contact your provider to find out exactly how it is updated and review your mobile site to make sure it delivers optimal results to both your mobile users and to Googlebot. This might also be a good time to re-evaluate why you need a third-party mobile site in the first place and either switch over to the Yahoo-provided mobile storefront (which will have to be customized) or take the leap and convert your site to be responsive. If you are interested in either of these two options, we are happy to help you. Contact us.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

CPR for a Yahoo Store on Google's Supplemental Index

Recently a client of mine came to me and said that most of his store pages disappeared from Google, and he did not do anything to make this happen. I was a bit skeptical, so I went to Google, did a search on his store, and sure enough, there were only two pages indexed, his home page and his site map (ind.html) page. The rest were in the supplemental results, which means that Google thought the rest of the pages were not much different than these two pages. When I looked at the supplemental results, the little excerpts under each link were exactly the same, and I also noticed that what Google showed under each result was actually text from the ALT tags of the header image. I looked at some of these pages in my client's store, and they were actually different. This was a bit puzzling, but then I thought perhaps Google saw that the header and left navigation was the same throughout the site (which is pretty normal), but that the text that made each page different was too far down ins

How to create clean and efficient CSS

In a typical workday, I deal with dozens of yahoo stores and very often I have to tweak, fix, or change CSS used by these stores. While some stores have very clean and easy to follow style sheets or CSS definitions, the vast majority of stores I've seen seem to include complete hack jobs, style sheets put together completely haphazardly, or as an afterthought. While working in such a store, the idea came to me to turn my gripes into a post. So the following is my list of dos and don'ts of good CSS or style design. 1. Externalize your style sheets. This means to save your style sheets into one or more css files, and link to them using the <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="/lib/yourstoreid/yourstyle.css"> notation, or in Editor V3.0, you can use the LINK operator. 2. Combine your style sheets into as few files as possible. Nothing worse than trying to wade through 6, 8, 10 or more different style sheets to find the color of a l

What to expect when your redesign goes live

At Y-Times we roll out new designs, redesigns and other major upgrades to Yahoo stores on a fairly regular basis. Some of the main questions our clients ask are how to prepare for a roll-out and what to expect in terms of SEO and conversions when the changes go live? For any functional Yahoo store how well the site ranks and how well it converts are probably the two most important metrics. Since pretty much ANY change you make to any page can potentially alter either or both of these metrics, merchants may understandably feel nervous about far reaching alterations to their sites. However, when those functionality and design changes and additions are done right, there is really very little to fear. First off, what does it mean for a design or redesign to be "done right?" From the technical stand point, search engines look at the underlying structure of your site (the HTML, and increasingly also the CSS and JavaScript code) to try to extract information and meaning from i