What is the Mobile First Index and how it works – Elabs Consulting

Have you heard talk of the Google Mobile First Index or MFIbut you don't know what that is?

Would you like to know the difference between this concept and what it means to have a website adapted to mobile?

The use of mobile devices has increased significantly in recent years, which has resulted in the optimization of websites in format mobile apps, whether it is something fundamental to the success of a web page.

That is why since Google has started to give you a lot more strength to the optimization of the site on mobile devices ( and in particular since the last mobile first index update), have appeared two concepts that, a priori, they look the same, but they are not: Website adapted to mobile and Google Mobile First Index. This makes a lot of people to come by confusing these two terms from a long time ago.

That's why, in this article, I'll talk about what are the differences between a website adapted to mobile, and in what consists mainly of the Mobile First Index.

Let's go there!

Differences between the Mobile-First Index and a website adapted to mobile

The main difference between both concepts is that the first term refers to a methodology devised by Google, which captures the idea of prioritizing the usability and navigability for mobile before by devices desktop. Then, a website adapted to mobile, it is a consequence of this methodology, which involves having to part of our website is optimized for desktop (as was customary until now), and it's also well-built and designed for mobile.

What is it and how to prepare for the Mobile-First Index?

The Mobile First Index, is a change implemented by Google now will make about 3 or 4 months, which affects mostly on the ranking of the positions in the SERPs.

What does that mean? Therefore, from now on, due to the increase in searches via mobile devices vs the searches on desktop, we will have to reverse the priorities to build a website:

Like a while ago I designed a mockup and we built a structure of how it should be web-format desktop, and then adaptábamos to mobile, now the priority will be to first create the web in format mobile, and then this same, to adapt it to desktop.

What do you have in mind the Mobile First Index?

1. Crawling: before Google crawleaba 4 times the total of urls on our site. Today, if you look at the search consolethe number of hits that makes us Google on our website has disappeared. That means that it is not a metric important. So, How should we read this? Websites need to be compressed much better the information they provide, subject to more specific, and resolving in a more effective way the search intent of the user. We will also need to take into account to have optimized all of the urls we index.
2. Long Tail: we have to differentiate very well between what is a Google search and the structure of necessary data that we need to generate. We have to be able to understand that sometimes one brand can be combined with a category, but when I change the category, you can be that interesting brands for this category also change.
3. Search intent: we have to make sure that the urls that satisfy the search intent that they are tracking.
4. Data structure highly optimized: given that the search engine we crawlea much less we have to reach out to calculate the volume of the market for each category and its subcategories in such a way that it may come to pass that a category + location index 5 combinations, but for another combination of category + location not indexed by any category. Example:

• Home caregivers + Madrid > 2.000 search month > Yes indexo.
• Caregivers sick Alzheimer Madrid > 200 searches per month > Not indexo

1. Identify seasonality of the product: as seekers we crawlean much less, we need to know what part of the year, there are more searches every area of the website, to be able to change all the linking to internal. In the end, it comes to Google to see what is relevant whenever you visit our site.
2. Usability: If for example we are seeing a website on a desktop, maybe it is very important that you appear 10 reviews of visible form. In contrast, if we look at this same website, in format mobile, with 3 or 4 reviews as we will be enough. The reason is very simple: first, we do not have the same space (on mobile, the space is smaller) and, in the second place, we must bear in mind that the navigability and the intuition that is used by the user to move along the pages, it is completely different.

How do I know if I'm on Mobile First Index?

First it is necessary to clarify what it is to have a website Mobile Friendly, which is one of the main confusions with the Mobile First Index. Mobile Friendly it means that the web is adapted to mobile, that is to say: that is responsive, that looks correctly on mobile devices, that is designed for usability that is made from the mobile phone. It is very different than the use of a web from the computer from the mobile phone. How do we know if a web site is optimized for mobile? Because it is a fast web, with images adjusted to the size of the screen, with readable text and links are visible.

That said, the Mobile First Index has nothing to do with the above. The MFI is composed by a crawler and a new algorithm that, when combined, make change the values for which a web deserves to go higher in the ranking.

From our point of view, this is the biggest update that has made google from that introduced the concept of search intent. Really the MFI has done nothing more than to start and what we have experienced until now, has nothing to do with what is to come: a month ago, Google did the umpteenth wave of change of the crawler on the web, putting the crawler main the mobile apps.

How do we know this?

In our case, Elabs, we have access to more than 200 Search Consoles that allow us to be up to date with the massive changes.

That is why, since the last wave of changes, in the last month and a half has been more than 2 updates weekly to give an account of the changes, especially the more weight it has had on the practice. For example, the crawlingthe bot crawlea at least 4 times less. It is very important, to understand the evolution of Google tools. Note that now the Search Console because it does not tell us how many requests we made a day of the bot.

For its part, the bots are in charge of:

• Tracks the url that has the highest priority.
• Download the content, parses and extracts all the urls.
• Saves all the urls in the list of urls to navigate.
• Given a value (to each other) or what is the same thing a priority. Back to start with the highest priority.

How do I know if I'm on Google Mobile First Index?

In the part of “Coverage” of the Search Console, above all to the right, we can see what is the bot that we are navigating.