{"id":186116,"date":"2016-11-07T10:26:22","date_gmt":"2016-11-07T08:26:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/?p=186116"},"modified":"2016-11-07T10:27:42","modified_gmt":"2016-11-07T08:27:42","slug":"google-moving-to-mobile-first-index","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/internet\/186116-google-moving-to-mobile-first-index.html","title":{"rendered":"Google moving to mobile-first index"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"https:\/\/webmasters.googleblog.com\/2016\/11\/mobile-first-indexing.html\" target=\"_blank\"><strong>Google has announced<\/strong><\/a> that its algorithms will eventually primarily use the mobile version of a site\u2019s content to rank pages from that site.<\/p>\n<p>Most people are searching on Google using a mobile device, but Google\u2019s ranking systems still typically look at the desktop version of a page\u2019s content to evaluate its relevance.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThis can cause issues when the mobile page has less content than the desktop page because our algorithms are not evaluating the actual page that is seen by a mobile searcher,\u201d said Google.<\/p>\n<p>Google is now running experiments to make its index mobile-first.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;Our algorithms will eventually primarily use the mobile version of a site\u2019s content to rank pages from that site.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Below are recommendations to help webmasters prepare for a mobile-focussed index.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>A\u00a0responsive site or a dynamic serving site where the content and markup is equivalent across mobile and desktop should mean no changes are needed.<\/li>\n<li>A site configuration where the primary content and markup is different across mobile and desktop will require changes.<\/li>\n<li>Serve structured markup for both the desktop and mobile version.<\/li>\n<li>Verify the equivalence of their structured markup across desktop and mobile by typing the URLs of both versions into the Structured Data Testing Tool and comparing the output.<\/li>\n<li>When adding structured data to a mobile site, avoid large amounts of markup that isn\u2019t relevant.<\/li>\n<li>Use the robots.txt testing tool to verify that your mobile version is accessible to Googlebot.<\/li>\n<li>Sites do not have to make changes to their canonical links.<\/li>\n<li>Verify your mobile version of the site in Search Console.<\/li>\n<li>If you only have a desktop site, Google will index your desktop site &#8211; even if Google is using a mobile user agent to view your site.<\/li>\n<li>For\u00a0a mobile version of your site, remember\u00a0that a functional desktop-oriented site can be better than a broken or incomplete mobile version.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<h3 class=\"my-4\">Now read:\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/internet\/185894-what-south-africans-ask-google.html\">What South Africans ask Google<\/a><\/h3>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Google\u2019s algorithms will eventually primarily use the mobile version of a site\u2019s content to rank pages from that site.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":23,"featured_media":140564,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_sma_x_autopost_status":"idle","_sma_x_autopost_error":"","_sma_x_post_id":"","_sma_facebook_post_id":"","_sma_instagram_post_id":"","_sma_threads_post_id":"","_sma_x_attempts":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[36,167],"class_list":["post-186116","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-internet","tag-active","tag-google"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/186116"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/23"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=186116"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/186116\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":186134,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/186116\/revisions\/186134"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/140564"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=186116"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=186116"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=186116"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}