Google makes Mobile-First indexing the default for new domains

Google announced that it is making Mobile-First indexing the default for all new domains.

Over the years since announcing mobile-first indexing – Google’s crawling of the web using a smartphone Googlebot – Google’s analysis has shown that new websites are generally ready for this method of crawling. So mobile-first indexing will be enabled by default for all new, previously unknown to Google Search, websites starting July 1, 2019.

Most new websites are now generally showing users – and search engines – the same content on both mobile and desktop devices.

You can continue to check for mobile-first indexing of your website by using the URL Inspection Tool in Search Console. By looking at a URL on your website there, you’ll quickly see how it was last crawled and indexed. For older websites, Google will continue monitoring and evaluating pages for their readiness for mobile first indexing, and will notify them through Search Console once they’re seen as being ready. Since the default state for new websites will be mobile-first indexing, there’s no need to send a notification.

Google guidance on making all websites work well for mobile-first indexing continues to be relevant, for new and existing sites. For existing websites they determine their readiness for mobile-first indexing based on parity of content (including text, images, videos, links), structured data, and other meta-data (for example, titles and descriptions, robots meta tags). Google recommends double-checking these factors when a website is launched or significantly redesigned.

While Google continues to support responsive web design, dynamic serving, and separate mobile URLs for mobile websites, they recommend responsive web design for new websites. Because of issues and confusion they’ve seen from separate mobile URLs over the years, both from search engines and users, they recommend using a single URL for both desktop and mobile websites.