At the end of 2018, Google announced they now use Mobile First Indexing (MFI) for more than half of their search results worldwide. The changes have been in the works since 2016 due to significant increases in the amount of users searching Google from mobile devices. Since Google is by and large the most popular search engine, with over 60% more searches than the second place search engine, ensuring your site adheres to MFI standards is vital to getting your audience to see your business.

What Is Mobile First Indexing?

Normally, Google uses bots to crawl the desktop version of webpages and decide their SERP ranking. Now, MFI uses a smartphone Googlebot to crawl websites that simulates the way users access the search engine from their mobile devices. A desktop-friendly site is not much use to a mobile user, especially if that site is missing content for mobile viewers, or if a mobile version doesn’t exist at all. As Google is always working to improve the experience of its users, it is moving towards penalizing websites that don’t cater to mobile viewers.

Read the full blog here.