Currently, Google only has one index based on the desktop site. It creates signals based on Googlebot with desktop user agent. Google then crawls with its mobile Googlebot to collect mobile and other signals, but they don't create a new index based on the mobile site. Currently, when a user searches Google (desktop or mobile), the retrieval part of the algorithm looks at the desktop index created by the Googlebot desktop crawler. It finds relevant results based on the desktop index, then ranks them based on the desktop index and even shows the searcher a snippet based on the desktop index. The Ranker then reviews the mobile signals collected by the mobile crawler and adjusts the ranking accordingly. This caused some problems.
There are way too many cases fax list where a user sees something in a snippet, clicks on the results, gets redirected to the site's mobile homepage (which probably spawns an app store or newsletter popup ), then realizes that the content he saw in the search snippet isn't available on the mobile-clean version of the site. It's a bad user experience, but it's pretty much the norm on too many sites. With this new change, Google is looking to stop that. The general theory (I'm not talking about Google or Gary) is that if the content isn't important enough to be on your mobile site, then maybe you're not the most relevant result or the most relevant to this content. Ok… what does this mean? I see lately are all about ranking. While it's true that indexing can affect rankings, that shouldn't be our primary concern.
We should take a step back and look at indexing if we really want to be prepared for this change. Advertising Continue reading below When it comes to indexing, only a few potential situations may arise for your site. Ignore the concept of “mobile friendly” as this only offers a small ranking boost. That may also not come into play here. It is important to distinguish between “mobile friendly” for ranking and “mobile index” for relevance. Although the weights of “mobile friendly” may change, it is not the same concept as a mobile index. A site can be in the mobile index without being mobile-friendly. When it comes to the first mobile index, there are only about three sets of scenarios: a website is either responsive, has a separate mobile site, or doesn't have a mobile site at all.