After months after Google announced the rollout of the mobile-first indexing process, webmaster and SEOs have begun getting notifications via Google Search Console of their sites being “enabled” for mobile-first indexing.
It says in the notification that “mobile-first indexing enabled for” and specifies the domain name of the site it was enabled for. Ari Finkelstein shared a screen of the notification on Twitter:
— Ari Finkelstein (@arifinkels) April 30, 2018
It reads:
This means that you may see more traffic in your logs from Googlebot Smartphone. You may also see that snippets in Google Search results are now generated from the mobile version of your content.
Background: Mobile-first indexing means that Googlebot will now use the mobile version of your site for indexing and ranking, to better help our (primarily mobile) users find what they’re looking for. Google’s crawling, indexing, and ranking systems have historically used the desktop version of your site’s content, which can cause issues for mobile searchers when the desktop version differs from the mobile version. Our analysis indicates that the mobile and desktop versions of your site are comparable.