Google has Updated its Mobile-First Indexing Developer Docs

Posted On : January 23rd, 2020   By : Dillip K Mohanty   To : Google Update, Technical SEO

On 22^nd Jan, Google has notified that they have made some significant updates to their developers documentation on mobile-first indexing. So, webmasters should definitely check out these updates and follow them to make sure that their users have the best experience.

We made some significant updates to our developers documentation on mobile-first indexing (☎️#⃣1⃣📙?), Whether your site has been moved over already or not, it's worth checking it out 👇https://t.co/yo4mGQZkqh

— Google Webmasters (@googlewmc) January 22, 2020

Here, I’m going to share the important points in brief.

1. Make sure that Googlebot can access and render your content

• Use the same meta robots tags on the mobile and desktop site.
• Don’t lazy-load primary content upon user interaction.
• Let Google crawl your resources.

2. Make sure that content is the same on desktop and mobile

• Make sure that your mobile site contains the same content as your desktop site.
• Use the same clear and meaningful headings on the mobile site as you do on the desktop site.

3. Check your structured data

• Make sure that your mobile and desktop sites have the same structured data.
• Use correct URLs in structured data.
• If you use Data Highlighter, train it on your mobile site.

4. Put the same metadata on both versions of your site

• Make sure that the descriptive title and meta description are equivalent across both versions of your site.

5. Check the placement of your ads

• Ads can harm your mobile page ranking. So, don’t let them harm your ranking by following Better Ads Standard.

6. Check your images

• Provide high quality images.
• Use a supported format for images.
• Don’t use URLs that change every time the page loads for images.
• Make sure that the mobile site has the same alt text for images as the desktop site.
• Make sure that the mobile page content quality is as good as the desktop page by using the same descriptive titles, captions, filenames, and text relevant to the images on the mobile site as you do for the desktop site.

7. Check your videos

• Don’t use URLs that change every time the page loads for your videos.
• Use a supported format for your videos and put videos in supported tags.
• Use the same video structured data on both your mobile site and desktop site.
• Place the video in an easy to find position on the page when viewed on a mobile device.

Additional Tips for Webmasters having separate URLs

• Make sure that the error page status is the same on both the desktop and mobile sites.
• Make sure that your mobile version doesn’t have fragment URLs.
• Ensure that the desktop versions that serve different contents have equivalent mobile versions.
• Verify both versions of your site in Search Console.
• Check hreflang links on separate URLs.
• Ensure that you mobile site has enough capacity to handle a potential increase in crawl rate on the mobile version of your site.
• Verify that your robots.txt directives work as you intend for both versions of your site.
• Use the correct rel=canonical and rel=alternate link elements between your mobile and desktop versions.