The internet started out with a big PC box and a monitor in the form of a CRT screen. You probably remember these cubic televisions and monitors, which got larger before finally transitioning to flat screens. Manufacturers made thinner screens. As content grew, search engines began indexing and ranking websites and pages based on desktop display and desktop compute power. Then something happened: we started using cell phones to access websites. Sites got better, and responsive: now most sites display nicely on mobile devices and adapt to the size of the screen. In fact, users access more webpages today from a cell phone than from a desktop. We live in a mobile-first world. However, search engines have kept their rankings and indexing methods using desktop-first. It’s time to change and Google recently announced they are moving Google Search to Mobile First. Depending on the magnitude of the change this could be almost zero impact. Or it could shift many sites from page 1 to page 2, 3 or 4, and vice versa. What are the implications for site owners?
Display and content
In its blog post Google mentioned that responsive websites should have minimal impact from the upcoming change. A responsive site adapts to the screen size and keeps all or most of the content intact, when going from Desktop to Mobile. In most cases what may not show on a mobile is sidebar content. This can include ads, related posts, about the author snippets, or other pieces of information. In essence these pieces may not be essential, and they may be accessible in mobile view by clicking on a link. In other cases sidebar content tends to move to the bottom, after the main content is displayed. This just re-arranges the user view without removing anything, to the extent the user scrolls to the bottom of the page.
Requirements for display list evolving requirements, such as the featured image being at least 696px and the site logo being on a white or clear background.
Performance in a Mobile First world
One aspect that may impact indexing and ranking is the performance of mobile pages. Typically, desktop pages are much faster than mobile. It can be that the mobile pages are too heavy and attempt to load full size images, for example, on a slower internet connection. It could be that the device is not as powerful as a PC. Either way, Google (and Facebook, with Instant Articles) wants mobiles pages to be FAST. So it’s sponsoring AMP HTML, an open source initiative to evolve the clunky HTML language and its associated technologies like Javascript. You can still run HTML as long as it’s AMP HTML. You can still run Javascript, as long as it’s AMP Javascript. In our tests we showed one identical webpage went from 69% to 86% in Google PageSpeed tests, just comparing the standard mobile URL and the AMP URL. AMP provided an immediate 17% performance gain on this scale. While Google and other search engines have not formally announced that AMP would become a ranking factor, they certainly want to web community to be using it, and it would not be a surprise if one day, AMP-style mobile speed became an SEO must, and a ranking factor. As a result now is a great time to create AMP pages.
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