Starting next spring, something that’s been in the works for years (and has been talked about for a few months) is now scheduled to take place: websites without mobile versions will be banned from Google’s index. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic that steadily overtook the entire planet at the beginning of the year, Google extended the timeframe and deadlines for website owners for this transition so that they are now required to have a mobile-optimized website by March 2021. After this point in time, any desktop-only content will not be indexed or ranked, according to SEO guru John Mueller.
In addition, John Mueller also went into detail about what website operators who still have the switch ahead of them need to keep in mind. We have summarized the tips in this blog post. It is important to note that the ban does not only affect blogs, written articles, and web pages, but also photos and videos, which will be removed after Google’s update.
According to Mueller, this becomes problematic with M-Dot websites. These are websites that have separate URLs for desktop and mobile versions. Webmasters should focus on checking their hreflang links on their M-Dot versions. This is because it is important that users who visit a website using their desktop browser are automatically redirected to the desktop version, so this link needs to be working. Changes and information can be found in Google Search Console.
In preparation for mobile-only indexing, Yingxi Wu from the Google Mobile First Indexing Team also gave a few tips. For example, webmasters should make sure to use the same robots meta tags for both desktop and mobile versions, and avoid lazy loading on mobile versions. Optimizing the mobile view is particularly important to avoid images from being of different sizes and thus messing up the layout of the website on a smartphone, so care should also be taken to ensure that robots.txt files do not prevent crawling by Google.
Webmasters should tackle the task of converting their sites as soon as possible; otherwise, companies can expect large losses in traffic. Among other things, tools provided by Google such as Best Practices can be used to simplify the conversion.
