With mobile has now become the most prominent mode of content consumption, Google is likely to introduce an unexpected change to focus more on the same. In an attempt to timely offer fresh content to mobile users, Google is currently building and will launch a seperate mobile search index, reports Search Engine Land.
This explicitly means that Google search results on your desktop and mobile could start to surface very different results in the coming months. And the mobile results will be better and updated as compared to desktop results. They’ll also be easy to store and manage due to their smaller size as compared to desktop websites.
Post the launch of mobile index, Google will continue to maintain the desktop one but update it less frequently. It will also make mobile index as the primary or main source that the search engine uses to respond to queries. The desktop index, which forms the base of the search engine, will soon become less important.
Convinced with the importance of mobile in today’s scenario, Google has been planning to introduce something similar for quite some time. The change has been announced(and confirmed) by Gary Illyes, a Google webmaster trends analyst during his keynote address at Pubcon. The info on launch timeline is very bleak but Illyes expects it to happen within months. The news has already spread like wildfire among digital marketers and webmasters. Here are few tweets highlighting the upcoming change:
.@methode: Google creating a sep mobile index, which will be it’s primary index. Desktop will be a secondary index,less up to date #Pubcon
— Lisa Barone (@LisaBarone) October 13, 2016
Mobile first index will change things since mobile sites tend to not be as large as desktop. @methode #pubcon
— Jennifer Slegg (@jenstar) October 13, 2016
If the content on your mobile page is the same as desktop, those sites will be fine. @methode #pubcon
— Jennifer Slegg (@jenstar) October 13, 2016
