From July 1, 2019, Google switched from ‘desktop-first indexing’ to ‘mobile-first indexing’. More than half the world’s population—3.8 billion people—is online, and of these, the majority of online users surf the internet through their mobiles, smartphones, and other portable devices. Also, media consumption on mobile is 33%, and that of TV is 34%. With all the statistics in hand, it is only apposite for Google to switch from ‘desktop-first indexing’ to ‘mobile-first indexing’.

We were in the epoch of desktops and computers until a few years ago. Owing to the utility and portability of mobile devices and smartphones, a large population drifted to the ‘mobile index’ spectrum in recent years. Desktops and systems started getting circumscribed to office and personal usage. This conversion rate is the very reason why Google thinks it is more accurate to account for the results obtained from ‘mobile index’ rather than ‘desktop index’ to evaluate and rank domains in Google search statistics.

In 2016, Google had started experimenting with mobile-index-based ranking. Google typically would crawl and index websites in both mobile and desktop versions to deliberate search results in its search engine. As more users started preferring mobile versions, Google presumed that the outcome would be reflected in their search results and hence started scrutinizing the ‘mobile index’ more.

For those domains that are recognized by Google and have desktop websites, there will not be any change. They will be under ‘desktop-first indexing’ only, as their desktop version will be considered the mobile version. The smartphone’s display size will be the ‘adjusting gauge’ for such websites.

But what happens to new websites in the plot? Well, Google assumes that newly launched websites are ready for this method of crawling. Also, Google announces that mobile-first indexing will be enabled for such new and previously unknown-to-Google Search websites from July 1, 2019.

In addition, Google will notify sites that are migrating to mobile-first indexing through Search Console. You might not know what Search Console is—Search Console is a tool that provides reports to help you measure your search traffic and performance, fix issues, and make your sites smarter in Google Search results. So, for the major websites on Google, it will continue monitoring and evaluating pages for these websites’ readiness to convert to ‘mobile-first indexing’ and, once they are seen as being ready, Google will notify them through Search Console.

Site owners can see a significant increase in crawl rate from ‘Smartphone Googlebot’ (a crawler program used to automatically discover and scan websites by following links from one page to another). Furthermore, Google will show the mobile version of pages in Search results and Google Cached Pages.

Even though this new change that Google announced is relevant to web owners and webmasters, the search results that Google users see from July 1 onwards are going to be from mobile-friendly devices. It is expected that more appropriate search results will be available on mobile devices, no matter whether the website searched for was accessed from a mobile device or a desktop.