Google, true to form, has chosen to push off the deadline time for going 100% into mobile-first indexing. The past deadline time was September 2020, yet after COVID hit, Google said they may push this deadline time back to give site proprietors more opportunity to plan during this time. Google chose early today to push the cutoff time to March 2021.
Google said,
“Our underlying arrangement was to empower mobile-first indexing for all destinations in Search in September 2020.”
Google realizes
“In these questionable occasions, it’s not in every case simple to concentrate on function as something else,”
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At that point Google posted issues it despite everything sees destinations making that can cause issues with a site being pushed to mobile-first indexing. In the event that a site is moved to mobile indexing and it has these issues, the site’s rankings in Google can and probably will change – perhaps for the more regrettable.
Here is the abbreviated list from Google that you should double-check between your desktop version and mobile version of your site:
- Robots meta tags on the mobile version
- Lazy-loading on the mobile version
- Be aware of what you block
- Make sure primary content is the same on desktop and mobile
- Check your images and videos including
- Image quality
- Alt attributes for images
- Different image URLs between desktop and mobile version
- Video markup
- Video and image placement
From what I’ve seen more time should’ve been taken before migrating sites with a separate m. as the MFI appears to struggle to display the correct page in the SERP even with similar content, correct canonicals and correct alternates #SEO https://t.co/MS2IFMBTdw
— Dan Nutter (@VeryDanNutter) July 22, 2020
Thanks for the information John. Yep I’m pushing for a move to a responsive site, to be honest a large part of it is the difficulty in maintaining the same content across both sites when updates are made, as well as shifting the client’s focus to be mobile first
— Dan Nutter (@VeryDanNutter) July 22, 2020
https://twitter.com/iSKGTi/status/1285867934292697089?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1285877423532322816%7Ctwgr%5E&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.seroundtable.com%2Fgoogle-mobile-first-indexing-deadline-march-2021-29815.html
Now, there is ample time to deal with this, however, almost everyone is on mobile-first indexing. You can verify whether your site is on mobile-first indexing inside Search Console and Google will likewise advise you of issues there.