According to a number of foreign sources, mobile Internet traffic exceeded desktop traffic in 2017. Google could not stay away from this trend: after all, more and more users are now searching for information in the search engine using smartphones or tablets.
Google's response to the "mobilization" of the modern Internet is the introduction of Mobile-First Index, a mechanism that prefers mobile versions of sites when indexing and builds mobile search results basing on relevant pages.
Moving Google to Mobile-First Index is a long and gradual process. Conversations about the development of such an index began more than two years ago, but its full-scale implementation started quite recently. We decided to compile the current timeline of events related to mobile indexing in the following infographics.
- September 2015 – the first mention about a separate mobile index being developed. For that moment, without the statement that it will definitely be implemented (Gary Illyes’ Twitter).
- November 2016 – the open testing of Mobile-First Index was announced. In certain situations for some users Google begins to create results based on mobile versions of the pages (the official Google blog).
- July 2017 – Gary Illyes at the SMX Advanced conference clarifies the situation around the launch of Mobile-First Index. According to him, the launch is likely not coming until 2018 at earliest, and the exact date is still unknown (article).
- October 2017 – SMX East conference. Confirmation of the fact that some sites have already been translated to the Mobile-First Index, but the number of them is still small and this cannot be called a full- scale launch (article).
- February 2018 – it was announced at the PubCon conference that a significant number of sites will be moved to Mobile-First Index in the next month or one and a half (the participant's tweet).
- March 2018 – Google announced the start of a large-scale launch of Mobile-First Index (official Google blog). In addition, it was announced a few days earlier at SMX Munich conference that webmasters will receive notifications in Search Console about the transfer of the site (the participant's tweet).
- May 2018 – at the beginning of the month webmasters began to receive notifications about the moving of their sites to the Mobile-First Index. On May 20, the second wave of notifications began, which focused on sites with identical contents of mobile and desktop versions.
Another reaction of Google to the rapid growth of mobile traffic was the launch of Speed Update, which considers the loading speed of mobile pages in the search ranking. Read more about it in our article.
