Mobile First Indexing and Its Effects on SEO
The subject of Mobile First Indexing has become very important in terms of SEO, especially after Google's latest announcement. With this statement, Google has stated that it gives priority to mobile devices in search engine results. Of course, this is also Mobile First Indexing system has increased its importance many times over.
After this system and the statement made, many questions began to bother the minds of company owners, especially those who moved their businesses to the digital environment.
In this article, we will answer the questions on your mind and also provide detailed information about Mobile First Indexing.
What is Mobile First Indexing?
Mobile First Indexing, as the name suggests, actually means that Google bots give indexing priority to the mobile version of your website. In other words, Google Bots index the mobile version of your website first and bring it to the results pages, while also preferring your mobile pages when caching.
Again, if your website does not have a mobile-friendly version, of course the normal version is indexed, but do not forget that your rankings may be affected equally badly. Therefore, we can say that high-quality and user-experience mobile pages are more valuable on Google these days.
What do I need to do to benefit from Mobile First Indexing?
First of all, after making this announcement, Google also announced that it was not planning a very drastic and rapid transition. So this change
It will happen gradually and slowly. For this reason, there is no need for you to fall into a big panic.
If the mobile and desktop versions of your current website are working efficiently and without any problems, you don’t have much to do. In fact, when the time comes, you will be able to join this bandwagon easily.
But your existing mobile pages sufficient optimization Examining whether it is subject to this and improving the user experience can be very beneficial for you in the future.
Apart from this, if you are using a different mobile version of your site than the desktop version, you need to pay attention to the following points.
- Contents : Make sure that the same content, such as images, videos, and text, that is available on the desktop version of your site also works seamlessly on your mobile version.
- Structural Data: You should check that the desktop and mobile versions of your website have the same equivalent structured data. Also, the URLs of your structured data on your mobile pages should be parallel on your mobile version.
- Metadata: You should check that the metadata of your website is the same on both your desktop and mobile versions, and if not, correct it.
- Hreflang : If you are using rel:hreflang, which is used for international publications, you should check if it also points to your mobile version.
- Your Social Metadata: Check if your social media metadata is available on both your desktop and mobile versions, and if not, add it before it’s too late.
- Your Sitemaps: Make sure your sitemap is accessible in the mobile version.
- Application Directories: Don't forget to enable this on mobile if your app directories are set up for your desktop version only.
- Your Server Capacity: Check your server capacity and make sure it is capable of handling the increased browsing speed.
- Switchboard Tags: If you are using Mobile Switchboard Tags, you do not need to take any action.
