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If you’re reading this article on a smartphone or tablet, you’re part of the majority.
In February 2017, mobile devices accounted for nearly half (49.7 percent) of all webpage views, and mobile users are also regularly interacting with content: The Interactive Advertising Bureau reported that 63 percent of smartphone users around the world turn to their phones at least every 30 minutes.
The trend of mobile content consumption has been growing—and search engines such as Google are taking note.
On Monday, Google announced the change on its Webmaster Central Blog:
Today we’re announcing that after a year and a half of careful experimentation and testing, we’ve started migrating sites that follow the best practices for mobile-first indexing.
To recap, our crawling, indexing, and ranking systems have typically used the desktop version of a page’s content, which may cause issues for mobile searchers when that version is vastly different from the mobile version. Mobile-first indexing means that we’ll use the mobile version of the page for indexing and ranking, to better help our – primarily mobile – users find what they’re looking for.
We continue to have one single index that we use for serving search results. We do not have a “mobile-first index” that’s separate from our main index. Historically, the desktop version was indexed, but increasingly, we will be using the mobile versions of content.
Back in 2016, Google first detailed its plan to change the way its search index operates, explaining how its