Google has begun slowly rolling out the mobile-first index to a small subset of users. The folks at Search Engine Land has published a large list of FAQs around the mobile-first index.
But one interesting tidbit is that by default, Google isn’t going to use the AMP version of your page for the mobile index, even if you don’t have a mobile-friendly alternative.
Here’s an example from Barry Schwartz:
[fusion_builder_container hundred_percent=”yes” overflow=”visible”][fusion_builder_row][fusion_builder_column type=”1_1″ background_position=”left top” background_color=”” border_size=”” border_color=”” border_style=”solid” spacing=”yes” background_image=”” background_repeat=”no-repeat” padding=”” margin_top=”0px” margin_bottom=”0px” class=”” id=”” animation_type=”” animation_speed=”0.3″ animation_direction=”left” hide_on_mobile=”no” center_content=”no” min_height=”none”][Y]ou have a website that is only desktop-friendly, i.e., there is no mobile-friendly version, but you decide to skip mobile-friendly and go directly to building AMP pages for your site. So now you have a desktop version and an AMP version of your website. AMP is super mobile-friendly, it is super-fast, and it is specifically designed for mobile.
As Barry pointed out, Google said that thay won’t use the AMP version in the new mobile-firsts index, and use the desktop version instead. It’s possible to force Google to use AMP in this case, but you’ll have to use a rel alternate attribute to force it. But Google will pick your desktop version of your site instead of mobile-first index by default.
It was reported by Jennifer Slegg that Maile Ohye From Google said this at the State ofSearch conference:
So @maileohye confirmed that in a situation where there is desktop and AMP, Google will index desktop for mobile first. #StateofSearch
— Jennifer Slegg (@jenstar) November 14, 2016
Barry Schwartz found this surprising, and in turn, asked Gary Illyes from Google about it. Gary then confirmed it on Twitter:
@rustybrick @maileohye @AlanBleiweiss yeah. I should’ve said that if you make the amps your pages’ mobile version, then amps would be picked
— Gary Illyes (@methode) November 16, 2016
He also said that he hadn’t seen a case where a site had AMP and did not also have a mobile version:
@rustybrick @maileohye @AlanBleiweiss but with the default amp setup desktop is picked. I dunno of any site that has only desktop+amp tho
— Gary Illyes (@methode) November 16, 2016
It does seem strange that Google would decide to pick the desktop version over AMP, but in a number of cases, there is no real site navigation to crawl the website. From the side of indexing, this would make sense.
Source – Barry Schwartz[/fusion_builder_column][/fusion_builder_row][/fusion_builder_container]