Today, most people are searching on Google using a mobile device. However, Google's ranking systems still typically look at the desktop version of a page’s content to evaluate its relevance to the user. This can cause issues when the mobile page has less content than the desktop page because Google's algorithms are not evaluating the actual page that is seen by a mobile searcher.
To make Google's results more useful, they’ve begun experiments to make their index mobile-first. Although their search index will continue to be a single index of websites and apps, their algorithms will eventually primarily use the mobile version of a site’s content to rank pages from that site, to understand structured data, and to show snippets from those pages in their results. Of course, while their index will be built from mobile documents, theyre going to continue to build a great search experience for all users, whether they come from mobile or desktop devices.
Google understands this is an important shift in their indexing and it’s one they are take seriously. They’ll continue to carefully experiment over the coming months on a small scale and they will ramp up this change when they’re confident that they have a great user experience.
