Google recently announced that it’s planning to divide it index so it can give mobile users a better search experience. What does this mean for SEO? And what’s the Google index?
All right, let’s start from the beginning. When your website was launched, Google sends a little spider called Googlebot into your website to sniff out the content. Googlebot is a smart bugger; it figures out what your site is all about within a day or two. Once it knows what your website is all about, what content you want to show to the world and what content you want to block, Googlebot begins to index your site so it can be listed in its searches. You can see what pages of your website is on Google by typing into the search bar “site:example.com” (of course, you should change example.com to your domain name).
Since its beginning, Google has always had one index to rule over everything. That means if you find your website is number one for a certain key term on your laptop, chances are you’ll see a similar outcome on when searching on your phone. However, time has progressed and technology has changed. A recent report from Hitwise found that nearly 60 percent of all searches are done through mobile devices. And this number will just keep increasing as time progresses. Google wants your business. And in order to make its customers happy, it decided that the indexes must be separated, and the mobile search index will become the primary index.
So what does this mean, really? It’s still a little unclear what’s going to happen. What is known is the desktop index isn’t going to be updated as often as the mobile. It also means that your mobile website is going to be a lot more important. If your web developer removes some content or data because it’s too big for mobile, it may hurt your future SEO in the mobile index. This also might mean that your SEO plan should revolve more around mobile search than desktop search.
It’s still too soon to see what happens with the new mobile index, but this should be a major wake-up call for anyone whose website isn’t mobile friendly. Time to fix that issue.
If you need a responsive website that’s optimized for SEO, we can help. Contact the web development experts at ENX2 Marketing now to schedule a complete site audit.
