Episode 143: The potential impact of mobile only indexing

Daily SEO Tips

Let’s talk about whether Mobile Only Indexing might be impacting your site.

Hello. Thanks for listening to SEO tips today.

If you were not aware, Google announced that they would crawl all sites (desktop or mobile) with the mobile-only crawler. This announcement means that if you have anything on your desktop site that is not on the mobile view (content, comments, reviews, etc.) - those will not be in the new index. They started dropping desktop-only sites (March 2021) out of their index, but the last batch of sites is being moved over to mobile indexing in April/May 2021.

I think most people think because they have a responsive site that they will be fine, but that’s why I find Mike King’s analysis of the impact of mobile-only indexing so interesting.

His article was probably the most impactful I read last month. Mike looked at the disparity between mobile sites and their desktop counterparts, and he predicts that those missing elements will significantly impact SEO rankings. He also offers up a free tool to help you troubleshoot on your own, called PARTITO. It lets you check to see if your desktop and mobile experiences for search engines are the same or if you’re missing items on mobile from a technical perspective.

So that’s your tip for the day.

Double-check that the relevant parts of your site that are on your desktop site are also visible to Googlebot’s Smartphone crawler.

Thanks for listening. Come back tomorrow for another SEO tip.

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