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.
Let's see what this means for these three scenarios. Responsive sites The good news here. Almost nothing changes regarding hair masking service indexing. The same content is (mainly) seen by Googlebot mobile and Googlebot desktop. Google still needs to fix some issues, but I expect responsive sites won't see much of a change. Issues include things like changing tabbed content weights or drop-down menus that are probably less valued on desktop but should (in theory) not be devalued on mobile. Advertising Continue reading below Separate mobile and desktop sites This is where things get complicated. If a site has device type redirects OR an alternate and canonical rel tag configuration, the mobile crawler will only see the mobile site, not the desktop site.
This means that if some content is ONLY on the desktop site, the mobile Googlebot will not see it and end up in the first mobile index. That's the problem Google is trying to solve, but it's also a problem for many publishers. I showed the slide below at Pubcon. Using SEMrush, I entered all the keywords ranked for on both mobile and desktop. I then graphed them and highlighted the mobile keywords. What is not highlighted are all the keywords where ONLY ranks on desktop. This means that all of this content will likely not be seen by the mobile crawler and may soon stop showing after the mobile index changes. Or does he? Let's examine this in the next section. Screenshot from 07/11/2016 at 9.27.51 PM No mobile site The final category is for pages that don't have a mobile site.