Here’s the thing, mobile-first indexing is not without its own set of problems. So, what’s the deal Google? Are we doing mobile-first indexing or naw? If we are, why is so much desktop crawling still happening? Or, is it that you’re still crawling with desktop for URL identification because you know there are more links on desktop, but you’re still using mobile rendering for the indexing process? Somebody get Paul Hahr on the line! An Issue is Brewing However, despite that indication in Google Search Console, their crawl activity still stands at 75% verified bots remaining Desktop-first. We also have a large site that is one part publisher and one part marketplace that was switched to MFI as of November 2018. Here are a couple of examples:įor a large and popular e-commerce site, they are seeing 58.27% of their crawl coming from Googlebot Mobile. Despite that, many of the sites I work on continue to show inconsistent distributions of verified mobile and desktop bot crawl activity. Google made an official shift to Mobile-First Indexing as of September of 2020. So if we were to take the time to extrapolate this out, I believe that we are looking at a major issue across the web.
Keep in mind that our analysis only looks at homepages. There’s also a subset of 0.51% of URLs where the opposite is true.
We also took a look at indexability and found that 2.98% of URLs that self-canonical on Desktop do not do so on Mobile. For the technical minded, the Word Count we considered is based on what is extractable from a rendered page using. Scarier still, we found that only 16.29% of pages served the same word count between Mobile and Desktop. In our dataset of 5.3 million URLs, we discovered that 30.31% of URLs served a different number of internal links for desktop devices than they did for mobile devices. In preparation for this post, I asked Tony McCreath, the Australian technical SEO (and hairdresser to the stars) that acted as our data analyst to pull a specific subset of the data where we had both the mobile and desktop page for direct comparison. Directly from the analysis, we found a disparity between the median number of internal links being shown across the Desktop and Mobile pages.įrom the above snapshot of the analysis, every percentile of homepages that we analyzed had fewer internal links shown for mobile than they did on the desktop experience.
The most compelling insight that I got from our analysis was how often there is a material difference in content served between the desktop and mobile user context. I encourage you to check it out because we uncovered a lot of interesting things about the web by quantitatively reviewing millions of homepages. For the most part, though, website owners will see the mobile agent.As 2020 wound down, and I awaited the delivery of my Search Marketer of the Year award, I was honored to join the amazing Aleyda Solis and fantastic Jamie Indigo in contributing to the SEO chapter of the Web Almanac. That means site owners may see increased crawling by Google in the coming months, too, as the company will now use two different crawlers: one that identifies itself with the mobile smartphone user-agent and one that will look like the Chromium version it uses to render the desktop site. Google says most sites are now ready for its new system, but it will still occasionally crawl the desktop site with its traditional Googlebot. Google announced this initiative in 2016 and as it announced today, by September 2020, it’ll become the default behavior for all sites.Īfter a few small tests, the company started going all-in last year, and by December, it used mobile-first indexing for more than half of the web pages it showed in its search results. With mobile-first indexing, Google Search primarily uses a page’s mobile content for creating its search index and ranking. For a while now, Google has been working on making mobile-first indexing the default behavior of its search engine.
0 kommentar(er)
