Google rolls out mobile-first indexing for webpages

Google has officially announced the rollout of its mobile-first indexing after testing the feature for about one and a half year. The search engine giant in its blog post said, "Mobile-first indexing means Google will use the mobile version of a web page “for indexing and ranking, to better help our – primarily mobile – users find what they’re looking for."

The company further explains, "that it will have one index for search results, not a mobile-first index that’s separate from its main index. In other words, it will start to look to the mobile web pages to index the web, not the desktop version."

The switch to mobile-first indexing comes as an increasing number of people are now using mobile devices to search on the Internet. While Google's crawling, indexing, and ranking systems historically have been using the desktop version of a page's content, the company said that they may cause problems for mobile searchers when that version varies from the mobile version.

Google says that it will have one index for search results, rather than a mobile-first index that is separate from its main index. It essentially means that Google will start looking at the mobile Web pages to index the Web, not the desktop version. The search engine giant said, "For sites that have AMP and non-AMP pages, Google will prefer to index the mobile version of the non-AMP page."

In addition, Google has also started blocking access to its apps on uncertified devices whose firmware was built after March 16th, 2018. If you're affected, you'll get a warning that a device is "not certified" and can't sign into a Google account. Users won't be prevented entirely from loading ROMs but they will have to register their device IDs on a whitelist every time they undergo a factory reset.