Launching a New Site Under Mobile-First Indexing

What changed yesterday

From yesterday, July 1, Google indexes every website it has not seen before using the version a phone receives. It calls this mobile-first indexing, and it is now the default for new sites.

Indexing is how Google reads and files a page so it can appear in results. Under mobile-first indexing, what Google reads and ranks is the phone version, including for people searching on a computer.

Existing sites have been moving across gradually since last year, as Google judges each one ready. New ones now start that way.

For anybody launching a website this summer, the phone version is no longer the secondary one. As far as Google is concerned, it is the site.

What counts as new

The default applies to sites Google has not encountered before, which in practice means a new domain.

A redesign on an address your business has used for years is not new in this sense. Google already knows the site, and moves it when it judges it ready, if it has not already.

The difference matters less than it sounds. Many established sites have already been moved, and the advice for both is the same: treat what the phone shows as the real page.

Where phone and desktop versions drift apart

• Shortened text on phones, cut to make the layout tidier.
• Sections switched off for small screens in a page builder.
• Tabs that load on tap, fetching their content only when pressed.
• Structured data present in the desktop template but not the mobile one.
• Images without alt text in a separate phone layout.
• A separate mobile site with fewer pages than the main one.

The second is the most common on sites built with page builders. One switch hides a crowded section on phones, and the phone version quietly becomes a shorter page than the desktop one.

Same content, same signals

Google's guidance for mobile-first indexing comes down to one principle: the phone version should carry the same content as the desktop version.

That means the same text and headings, and the same page titles and descriptions.

It also means the same structured data, the code that tells search engines a page describes a business, a product or an event. And the same alt text, the short written description attached to each image.

A responsive design, one set of pages that rearranges itself for each screen, makes most of this automatic. The drift happens when somebody decides that phones should get less.

Tabs, accordions and content that loads later

Tabs and accordions are a sensible way to fit long content on a small screen, and Google has said content inside them is fine.

The condition is that the content is already in the page, simply folded away. Content fetched from the server only when somebody taps is content Google may never see, because Google does not tap.

The same applies to images and sections that older scripts load only after scrolling. Before launch, ask whoever built the site whether anything on the phone version appears only after an interaction.

A worked example

A tile-setting company with two crews was launching its first website, on a new domain, this summer.

The designer had worked at a desk, as designers do, and the phone version had been arranged afterwards to fit.

On phones, the gallery captions had been cut and the list of towns served hidden to save space. Answers to common questions sat in tabs that fetched each one from the server only when tapped.

Read on a phone, which is how Google would now read it, the site barely said where the company worked or what any photograph showed.

The fix took two days before launch. The captions came back in shorter form, the towns became one line under the main heading, and the answers were placed in the page and folded rather than fetched.

Test the phone version first

Most sites are still reviewed on the screen they were designed on. For a new launch, reverse the habit.

Read every page on an actual phone, an iPhone and an Android if you can, as a stranger would.

Then run the main pages through Google's Mobile-Friendly Test, which shows the page as Google renders it on a phone.

Set up Search Console on launch day and submit a sitemap, the list of pages you want found. Its URL Inspection tool shows what Google found on any page, and which version of Google's crawler fetched it.

Speed is judged on the phone too

Since last year, how fast a page loads on a phone has counted in Google's rankings for searches made on phones.

A new site is the easiest time to get this right: images sized for the screens they appear on, fonts kept to a few files, and nothing loading that no page uses.

The other announcement yesterday

Also on Monday, Google proposed that the rules for robots.txt, the file telling search engines which parts of a site not to crawl, become a formal internet standard.

It also published the code it uses to read the file. Nothing changes for your site because of either. But launch day is when robots.txt most often goes wrong.

A development copy is usually kept out of search with a line blocking everything, and that line sometimes survives onto the live site. So does WordPress's setting that discourages search engines, left ticked after launch.

Check both on launch day, before Google's first visit.

The counter-case

For many new sites, none of this requires extra work.

A responsive site that shows phones exactly what it shows desktops, built by somebody who tested it on a phone throughout, is already ready for mobile-first indexing.

And Google indexing the phone version does not mean desktop design stops mattering. Plenty of customers, particularly businesses buying from businesses, still research on a computer at work.

But for a site launching on a new domain this summer, the phone version is the one Google reads. Build it complete, and test it first.

Before launch

1. Compare phone and desktop page by page.
2. Restore anything hidden on small screens.
3. Put tab content in the page itself.
4. Check structured data and alt text on phones.
5. Run the Mobile-Friendly Test on key pages.
6. Check robots.txt is not blocking everything.
7. Verify Search Console and submit a sitemap.

Step one is the one the rest depend on. Most of the drift between versions stays invisible until somebody reads the phone version deliberately, with the desktop version open beside it.

The original announcement in May is covered in every new site is mobile-first from July.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.